Pam Mellskog: Mommy Musings

WHEN I ASKED ANDY why he put the tiny white toilet with the flip lid into the tiny blue-and-pink playpen, he looked up from the old metal dollhouse.

“Because there was a tornado,” he said.

My middle kid, my 4-year-old boy, then went back to rearranging furniture in the dollhouse my Mother played with in the 1940s and my siblings and I played with in the 1970s.

Mom gave it to my three boys last Christmas after I found it shipwrecked and rusting in one of the barns at our family’s farm in Illinois.

It had been so long since anyone cleaned its dark red roof, shined its floors — all of them painted with area rugs or linoleum — or wiped down the fancy wallpaper patterns.

So, I hauled it into the house and laughed at the way my Mom and I both remembered its details — from the swan painted on the bathroom walls to the way the tiny furniture fits in every room.

The light blue bunk beds stack and come with a detachable ladder. The kitchen includes all of the appliances along with plates to go with the table and chairs. A white scale goes with the bathroom, and a clock sits on the fireplace mantle — if you want it to go there.

Ray, 2, just likes to push the dollhouse around inside of our house, which has simulated tornado-like conditions.

But watching Carl, 6, and Andy sorting  the jumbled contents in their own way gives me a good take on why  so many of us play house when we’re little.

We like to set up our world just so, however that looks to us and without regard for how it looks to anyone else.

Real life makes most of us get over this kind of play, and I get the practical side of that.

People who insist on “just so” seem tiresome, indeed.

Saying “Good enough!” can keep a person sane.

But watching my kids delight in doing their “just so” stuff in the dollhouse makes me think twice about the concept at work in the big house — how some just so play might make my day and theirs.

SOME DAY I MAY wear a ring with amethyst, garnet and turquoise stones to remind me of how much I treasure my kids.

Seems like only older ladies wear these birthstone rings, women who finally got the money and the perspective to keep a hand on glints of the persons they carried, mothered and one day freed like white doves to a blue sky.

For me, though, Wednesday would not have been a great day to visit the jeweler.

I woke up dogged by a headache for having stayed up too late again.

Housework, writing and all the other stuff that I need to do or actually like to do takes a back seat to bringing up three boys during their waking hours.

And on Wednesday, a day designated by Andy’s preschool teachers as pajama day, the pressure of all those things left undone smacked into a morning of haywire situations.

By way of background, my husband and I suspect that Ray, 2, tossed a sock or a small stuffed animal in the upstairs toilet.

I can write about our clogged toilet only because we suspect that the clog is something like a sock or a stuffed animal versus like something else.

My husband dutifully tried several methods of unclogging it before telling me that he needed to buy a snake at the hardware store, and I needed to be the one working it in the toilet or feeding it to the person working it.

Well, despite the fact that we’re throwing a party here tonight for our friends who have children with Down syndrome,  David put a toddler child-proof device on this toilet to prevent Ray and everyone else from opening it until he gets around to buying the snake.

Since I’m not up for snake shopping, I can’t complain.

Back to Wednesday morning.

The toilet lid lock stumped little Andy, 4, and he piddled on his  pajamas 2 minutes before we were supposed to walk out the door for school.

Carl, 6, hollered the news of Andy’s wet duds and the bathroom’s wet floor as I tied Ray’s shoes downstairs.

Not 15 seconds later, Carl said Andy literally had been playing with matches before the bathroom incident.

We finally piled into the car with me fuming and fantasizing about my single girl days of driving to work sipping coffee and singing along to the radio.

Perfect parents out there might point out that the strife up to then — about 8:22 a.m. — was my doing.

They would be right.

I should have gone to bed at 10 p.m., not after midnight;  should have pitied Andy for  encountering the toilet his father and I disabled; should have kept the matches under lock and key; and, finally, should have kept one eye on the rear view mirror and another on the windshield while driving to school to preempt tussling betwixt my backseat bunch.

I let all of those truths make me feel like a prospective runaway mom for the rest of the day.

But then I got some grace, a sense of when it’s my fault or when it’s my kid’s fault, it helps to be more like Mount Everest — to stay calm and make my own weather just like big mountains do.

Remembering this image the next time circumstances get chaotic won’t change all of our missteps.

But it will help me to be more intentional about giving my kids better emotional weather and treasuring them — ring or no.

WHITNEY HOUSTON’S VOICE SENDS me back to a dorm room in Minnesota, where my roommates and I would dance and sing along with her hit, “How Will I Know,” even as the guys living below us started beating the floor with a broomstick.

Andy and I visit some of my old college roommates in Minnesota in May 2008.

In the late 1980s, midway through our four-year education, our Christian college finally relaxed its ban on dancing to allow “dancing with discretion.”

So, we danced!

I returned to that era of my life after reading the news on Saturday that Houston’s staff found her dead at 48 in a bathtub at the Beverly Hills Hilton — a tragedy very likely related to her drug and alcohol abuse.

What happened to that that singer with the pipes that got us off the couch for study breaks?

I stayed up on Tuesday until 1:30 a.m. to troll the internet for footage that would tell more of her story, and I found it.

I watched Houston perform at her best — for instance, when she sang the National Anthem with a bewitching mix of elegance and raw power in 1991 for Super Bowl XXV at Tampa Stadium.

I also viewed her worst –her 2010 show in Birmingham, England, during which fans booed and afterward complained to the media about spending the equivalent of $105 to hear the strung-out queen of pop croak “I Will Always Love You.”

Houston got lost in stardust.

But listening this week to the ethereal climb of her voice — one described as coming along just once in a generation — helped me reflect again on her tremendous gift and the friends that celebrated it with me once upon a time.

Life is different now, of course.

And while I dearly love my old roommates and always will, God provides — a favorite saying of ours then and now.

These days, instead of swapping clothes and curling irons with them, I pass all sorts of things over the fence to my neighbor, April.

She passes all sorts of things my way, too.

We joked about it recently and tried to exhaustively list the items: a Chewbacca Halloween costume that her son, Jack, outgrew in time for Ray to wear last October; books; recipes; phone numbers; crock pots; muffin tins; a meat mallet; cookies; soup; rolls; blueberry oatmeal bread; raisin bran muffins; cake; white wine vinegar; chili; beef stew; onions; garlic; tomatoes; milk; flour; a whole chicken; various spices; eggs and the “love can.”

No hit songs anchor this time, but it is the same sisterhood.

In mid November, April knew that my husband, David, was on a business trip. She knew I would be stretched thin with managing my three little ones from bell to bell every day.

So, she surprised me by passing some homemade cream of broccoli soup and wheat bread over the fence to relieve me of dinner duty one night.

As the kids and I sat down to eat from our steaming bowls, Andy tasted his first spoonful.

“Yummy!” he said. “April put lots of sugar in this soup, Mama!”

“No, Andy,” I said. “She used the love can.”

This empty spice sits on our stove range. But at that time, I had passed it over the fence for her to check out.

Red lettering on the white can on the front panel reads: “LOVE Spice for Living NET WT. Immeasurable.”

A side panel lists these ingredients: “Faithfulness, gentleness, goodness, Joy, Kindness, Patience, Peace, Perseverance, Protection, Trust, Truthfulness and Unselfishness.”

Cooks can keep the can on the stove shelf to remind them to add all of the above to whatever they make.

I tasted that secret ingredient whenever I ate at my maternal grandparents’ home, which explains why I gave them the can when I spotted it at a novelties shop in 1986.

My Grandmother gave it to me in April when she downsized to move into assisted living.

Andy seemed reasonably satisfied with the love can explanation I gave for April’s good cooking.

He dipped his spoon in her soup a few more times before looking up with a final question.

“Mama?  Does everyone have a love can?” he said.

THREE ORANGE PLOW TRUCKS headed westbound on a deserted stretch of Colo. Hwy. 52, each one appearing about 10 seconds apart on the ridge a quarter mile off under grey skies with flurries.

They rumbled by, steel blades dropped, to throw snow aside again and again and again.

The power of those truck drivers working together to make a path — and then a two times better path –  stuck with me as I drove little Ray to The Children’s Hospital in Aurora for a sedated hearing test.

This storm closed schools in Boulder County and the Denver metro on Friday.

But I banked on four-wheel drive and lots of extra travel time to get Ray there.

For the test, an anesthesiologist sedates the patient while an audiologist sends a battery of sound waves into the ears. How the unconscious brain responds — or not — during about 75 minutes of receiving slightly different sound stimulation determines hearing aid need.

The power to know, to know for sure, what Ray hears makes me for the thousandth time grateful that my baby was born in 2009.

Every time our family benefits from the power of science, I glance over my shoulder at those boys and girls with Down syndrome born in 1909.

I wish I could stretch out my fingers through all that time to touch them and hear them. . .

When I finally met the anesthesiologist — a tall man dressed that day in a sweater, corduroys and Sorrel boots — he listed to Ray’s chest and folded his arms when he heard the remains of a cough.

“I know you got here today by dogsled,” he said. “But I have three kids. They’re older now, of course.  But for something like this I would go home and try again in a few weeks. . . . Blame it on me, the damn redneck from western Colorado.”

I wanted to hug him for being a father first.

After I got Ray out of his printed gown and white pants, we headed for the hospital cafeteria.

It was 11:30 a.m., and he last ate and drank at 8 p.m. the night before to prepare for  sedation.

I usually go without much when he needs to go without. I think that’s my way of going down the road as far as I can with him, which is not far at all.

So, my boy and I felt ravenously hungry.

As we gobbled our potato soup, crackers and melon mix, a mother nursing her baby under a cloth square at a table nearby struck up a conversation.

Ray and I joined them and smiled at the unveiling of baby Bethany — another one with 47 chromosomes versus the usual 46.

My new friend, 26-year-old Crystal, takes care of horses, goats and chickens at a farm in Fort Collins.

She kept her appointment in the storm, too, to get help in feeding solid foods to 13-month-old Bethany.

While this young mom ate her burger and fries, we bobbled the kids in our laps before heading north together through the snow.

Crystal followed us with Bethany in her grey Mercury LaSabre until Ray and I needed to exit Interstate 25.

I flipped my blinker on, rolled down the Jeep’s window and pumped my arm furiously in the blowing snow.

Good-bye, sister! Press on with that beautiful baby of yours!

As I drove up the ramp, Crystal passed me and waved just twice without taking her eyes off the slick road.

ON A BLUSTERY JANUARY day last week, I remembered my sunshine in a jar — three Kerr jars of salsa I stashed on a top shelf after canning tomatoes from our garden last summer.

Had I not run out of the commercial product, they likely would have sat there — behind cans of green and red enchilada sauce — until who knows when.

I broke the seal on one to serve with tortilla chips and pictured last summer, a season more memorable for being the first one in which we grew garden veggies behind the garage.

Growing anything — a story for the newspaper, a batch of yeast rolls, a quiet time in the wee hours with God — all of it brings a little more wonder to a day.

The garden just made the concept all the more tangible, something my kids enjoyed most during the harvest.

Carl, 5, and Andy, then 3, watched the squash and watermelons grow every day and kept asking if the time was right to pull the heavy produce from its vine.

Finally, my husband and I gave the OK.

The boys at first walked around holding squash like a baby until they realized it could double as a Star Warsesque light saber.

They rolled the watermelon around the backyard as if it were a barrel of beer on its way to a party.

Andy eventually exhausted himself this way. So, he used the watermelon as a pillow, sucked his thumb and rested while watching clouds drift by above and aspen quake just over the fence.

Dipping chips into this homemade salsa last week brought me back to this garden scene and the rest of late summer  — back to hikes around Mud Lake near Nederland with the kids and some friends; playing at the park; picking flowers; and climbing trees.

I call those images my memory’s melody line — the catchy ways life plays out.

But behind the scenes, David and I were paying bills and cleaning — well, not so much of that happens here anymore. We were going to work and running errands. We were wading through toys and shoes and rumpled clothes that could as easily be clean as dirty strewn as they were on the floor.

I don’t have pictures of those activities because that stuff is what we need to do, not what we get to do.

Being the mother of three young sons lands me in the practical more than I like, what with changing diapers and ironing school uniforms and making Play-Do.

So, I have begun trying a little more to appreciate how the weave of practical and whimsical makes music in a life.

I try to remember that a good time, like a good garden, happens because someone kept watering and weeding.

The trick is — at least for me — learning how to re-frame farming moments into something worth framing.

Photo/Jeff Haller

THIRTY FOUR YEARS AGO now, my husband’s parents asked him where he would like to go for his birthday dinner fully expecting him to say “McDonald’s!”

Instead, my guy — then a boy gunning to celebrate his fifth birthday — happily asked for lobster, which gave his parents a case of shock and awe even before they got the bill.

Growing up middle class in the Midwest, as David and I both did, sort of limits seafood exposure to fish sticks and tuna fish.

How he developed a taste for lobster before his fifth birthday baffles me, although my father-in-law suspects that he gave David a forkful of the seafood once while out to eat at Mr. Steak.

So, the family returned at the end of January in 1979 to the surf-and-turf restaurant popular then in Grand Rapids, Mich.

For David’s 39th birthday, I knew he would dig a little retro birthday date.

We both love lobster, though years go by without us enjoying it.

In January 2003, when we had been dating for four months and sensed that we would marry that year, I bought two lobsters to cook for him on his birthday.

We used my semi-filled bathtub as a holding tank as we cooked the rest of dinner in the kitchen.

The Times-Call food writer at the time inspired this act after she told me a gruesome fact — that cooking lobster means dropping them live into boiling water.

Looking back, the fresh water may have hindered more than helped my bid to keep lobsters alive between the grocery store tank and the boiling pot.

On our honeymoon, David and I ate it almost every day there, in Maine, where it sold fresh off the fishing boats for cheap.

So, last week I called our new babysitter, a girl who showered little Ray with TLC  at our town’s rec center play area before she knew his name.

She might as well be his guardian angel.

After Megan and her older sister settled in with our three sons, some homemade pizza, chocolate chip cookies and directions to call 911 — not us — if someone started choking, David and I headed to Red Lobster in Longmont.

Driving there, I called his folks to tell them that we were thinking about them and the fifth birthday splurge they gave their son, my future husband.

I tried to picture then and there — what they wore, what David wore and what they talked about as they dipped lobster morsels into clarified butter.

Yummy, yummy, yummy.

But my, how we play musical chairs in life.

Waxing nostalgic always brings me back to that, to noticing two empty seats in our booth as we unfolded our napkins and studied the menu in dim light.

As much as part of me misses them, David’s parents — the people who shaped so much of what I love about this birthday boy — another part of me already misses being there with my kids when, inevitably, they will blow out candles away from home.

This kind of birthday business brings my Grandma Nelson to mind.

At 93, she knows about musical chairs — how birthdays can remind you of who has come and who has gone before the ever-brightening cake.

But she would say the same thing about a birthday as the ordinary day before and after it. She would say to enjoy what God puts before you today.

Happy birthday, David!

RAY SAT IN THE late afternoon sunshine pulling his arms in just the right way to make that thing — that Sit-N-Spin activity toy — turn.

Around and around my boy went in a slow, dreamy orbit.

I dried my hands and watched him from the kitchen, but I might as well have been squinting through a keyhole.

I felt exactly as I did when I photographed Carl playing on the vast beach we call Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve near Alamosa, Colo., almost three years ago now.

Against this backdrop — either sand piling up in hard waves against a mountain’s elbow or Colorado’s famous sunshine flooding our living room — I can see the essential child before me.

That child comes without trappings, without all of the things that measure — report cards, growth charts and the like.

I’ve written about this before, but seeing my kids this way reminds me of viewing a diamond on a jeweler’s black velvet.

Without a setting, that stone looks like what it truly is — a precious chip extracted from a dark, deep place to catch light.

Not all diamonds come with the same clarity.  Not all diamonds get cut the same way.

But all of the jeweler’s diamonds, like all of God’s children, sparkle.

I know this is true.

But many nights I go to bed wondering what happened to my good intentions to see my sons — to really take them in as we move through the day together.

How could I let working, tidying, washing, grocery shopping, cooking and shuttling kids to and from school become such blinders?

Routine life tends to trick the eye, to make the background more noticeable than the family standing in the foreground.

The camera reminds me that all is not lost, that life comes to every one of us second by second in frames.

And, of course, the moments matter more than the hours or even the years.

So, when I get busy and start stumbling over my kids as they play with their Legos and Lincoln Logs and Hot Wheels cars, I want to see them more than the proverbial pot boiling over.

“Too fast, Mommy! Too faaaaast!” Andy wails sometimes when we need to get to another door on the double.

Too fast, indeed.

As the weekend comes, I hope to do more of what kids love for adults to do — to stop, stoop, smile and look them in the eye when they tell their story.

I hope to say “I see you” as much as “I love you.”

AS THE PRESCHOOL CLASS Christmas pageant began last December, Andy strode on stage as a shepherd and then — before my wondering eyes — held up both bare hands and pretended to blast the angels encircling the nativity.

The angels, girls wearing white gowns and crowns of silver tree tinsel on their heads, paid my shepherd boy no mind.

They focused instead on their adoring parents while my husband and I imagined yanking the boy in the brown robe off stage with an extra long shepherd’s crook.

Well, we all somehow survived the incident and went on to munch cookies and swig apple cider with the group.

I’m not sure Andy remembered any of his lines — if the teachers assigned the shepherds lines.

But tonight, as I thumb through the notebook I keep in my purse to catch kid quotes, I see this little shepherd delivering all sorts of lines in our life together.

Sept. 8, 2011:  “Maaaaaaaama!!!! Carl is stressing me!” (Scene: Andy hollers this from the kitchen in the midst of a butter knife sword fight with his brother, Carl, 5.)

Sept. 9, 2011: “Ray? Are you ready to fight? Get your kung fu pants on!” (Scene: Ray, then 21 months old, stops crawling on the kitchen floor and sits up to watch as Andy practices “kung fu” moves in the air.)

Nov. 17, 2011:

Andy: “Why did the kid throw the clock out the window? [No pause after the question - just straight to the punch line. . . ] Because he wanted to see time fly!!!”

Me: “Where did you learn that hilarious joke, Andy?”

Andy: “From an Iron Man Popsicle stick!” (Scene: Andy practices this — the first joke he can share, down-pat — on anyone anywhere.)

I’m still digging through all the quotes I’ve collected on this kid in my notebook and scraps of paper and napkins stuffed in my purse and pockets.

But so far in 2012, he has chattered off some good ones — like the time in early January when he knocked macaroni from a shelf at Target.

“My naughty hand did it, Mama,” he said, gingerly putting it back.

Or, what about that time on Jan. 6, 2012, when I parked the car in our driveway, pulled out my tweezers and began plucking my eyebrows?

Granted, a grown man would find this strange. But women get that natural light makes this grooming chore a lot easier.

So, I eyed the rear view mirror and began removing stray hairs until I noticed Andy staring at me from his car seat in the back.

Me: “What do you think I’m doing, Andy?”

Andy: “Something strange.”

Me: “Uh, huh. Well, Mommy can see better outside.”

Andy (after watching for a minute or two): “Mama, let me see your eyes. Mama? When you do that, you look like a mushroom. Ha! HA! HAAA!!!”

Most of the chitchat between Andy and me revolves around ordinary activities.

But on Jan. 5, 2012, as I tucked him into bed, he took his thumb out of his mouth and looked up from his ladybug Pillow Pet.

Andy:  “Why can’t we see God?” he said in his bedroom, dark but for a small night light.

Me: “Uh. . . Hmmm. . . Well, Andy. God is a spirit, and we can’t see spirits. But we can see something true about God in loving people and in all of nature.” [I flub teachable moments all-of-the-time, by the way.]

Andy (after a long pause): “Mama, sometimes angels glow, and sometimes they don’t.”

I kissed him goodnight and wondered what else my kids see that I miss.

THE NURSES LOOKING THROUGH the recovery room’s sliding glass doors laughed from their station as my pot-bellied son stood in his bed — a buck-naked boy, all grins and wobbles in the anesthesia afterglow during his first post-surgery diaper change.

I brought him there, to The Children’s Hospital in Aurora, at 6 a.m. on a Thursday in mid-November so the cardiologist could plug a hole about the size of a pencil tip in a vessel near his otherwise sound heart.

I’ve been meaning to blog about that day and the way it presented the last big medical mountain in 2011 for my little boy with Down syndrome to scale.

So, in the New Year, after a very busy stretch of life that kept me from posting since Halloween, I’m back to write about the party at the top.

Taking Ray home from the hospital that day gave me that feeling — that impulse to break out the bubbly, even though I’m a teetotaler.

This situation and so many others since his birth remind me that if he can make it, I can make it.

I told myself that again and again months earlier on Labor day when my buddy, Rob, and I climbed the 14,270-foot Mt. Grays’ peak in Colorado’s Arapaho National Forest.

I met Rob 18 years ago, when we both wore heavy, cranberry-colored choir robes with stoles — green, white, purple or cream-colored, depending on the liturgical season– to sing gospel music at our church in Minneapolis.

Though I moved to Colorado in 2000, we kept in touch. And when we started up the trail, I loved getting in step with my old friend under a robin egg-colored sky.

But as the grade steepened and the air thinned, it became more obvious that Rob and I represent opposite ends of the fitness spectrum.

He runs marathons — 44 since 1993 — and has bagged 13 of Colorado’s 54 famous “fourteeners,” those peaks that stand higher than 14,000 feet.

As for me?

Well, I run from the kitchen up a flight of steps to change laundry loads.

I still marvel at my grand oversight, one that by midday converted my legs to seaweed and pinched my lungs.

My light-duty lifestyle back home, a place nearly 10,000 feet below, felt as far away as India and as cushy as Buckingham Palace.

Rob, ever cheerful, assured me repeatedly that I could do this, and I knew he was right.

But it took a focus change from dwelling on what I lacked to dwelling on what I possessed.

That possession turned out to be memory after memory of little Ray Ray making it through surgeries and slowly, but surely, making developmental milestones with his zest for life and all-star try.

It helped in the tighter switchbacks to mentally hook a tow rope to Rob’s fanny pack.

But during the last hour, it all came down to faith — to asking the one who made the mountain to make me strong to climb it.

Then, I was there, standing in the wind with Rob, and the two of us rested with the whole beautiful state at our feet.

I wish I could bottle the mix of relief, gratitude, bewilderment and joy that washed over me as I looked to the plains and imagined my boy napping somewhere far away in the haze.

He napped, yes.

But, like me, Ray spent much of his day  climbing.

For the first time, he climbed alone from the main floor to the second floor in our home a dozen or more times with Daddy spotting him.

Happy New Year to you and yours!!!

UNTIL MY PARENTS TERM-limited my trick-or-treating, I looked forward to the annual Halloween candy bonanza and sidewalk costume party as soon as the first leaf on our farm turned red or gold.

So, what a surprise to me when the holiday lost its enchantment altogether — probably due to teenage self-consciousness about tangling my hair with wigs and hats or messing with makeup other than the lip gloss and mascara we girls wore then.

By the time I moved to the Twin Cities to attend a Christian college, Halloween took on a sinister tone. Local witches studying dark arts made headlines for animal cruelty charges related to their sacrifices.

So, how fun for me now as a parent of young children to view Halloween and all its pageantry and sugary excesses as glamorous again.

Anything can be twisted for naught or uncoiled for good — including Oct. 31.

The festivities at our house start in early October, when our two older boys — Carl, 5, and Andy, 3 — plaster clings of ghosts, bats, haunted houses and pumpkins on our living room windows.

We later visit the refreshingly candid lady down the road. She brought up five kids and still can’t believe she can spare the time to grow a pumpkin patch and man the stand from 9 to 5 on weekends.

There, we pick imperfect jumbo pumpkins — ones that grew so scary fast from blossoms to gourds that the side snuggled into the earth stayed flat and the side facing the sun grew round.

Their lopsidedness makes them fit better on our porch steps anyway.

Mid-month, I start hoarding candy. I keep the stash a secret from everyone to prevent a second candy run to to the store on Halloween eve.

Finally, I pull together costumes.

Ray, at 23 months, fits our Star Wars theme this year with his mini-Chewbacca outfit.

But he could do without the hat, which looks to me like a squirrel’s tail.

The furry/felt headgear probably bothers him more than the cute pumpkin blossom bonnet we tied on his noggin last year — and on his brothers during Halloweens past — because we could not help ourselves.

No holiday is perfect, though.

On pumpkin carving night, I realized the carving tools I hid to keep our littles from meddling were now hidden even to me — a sure sign that all the Diet Coke I drank in college finally caught up with my brain.

But I never forget the mysterious boy who every year comes knocking here and lingers on our porch after his buddies take off for the next door.

“You know, I lived here once,” he says.

I know the story from our neighbor lady.

He did live here, with his mother, his father and two — or was it four? — siblings.

Then, his parents split, and he moved from this home to another one across town.

“I know,” I say. I smile and wish I could hug this trick-or-treater.

“You know you are welcome to come back with one of your parents to see your old room any time,” I say instead.

He nods.

Then, this boy scampers into the night, leaving behind our unlikely haunted house.