"I'm bringing a guest to Cousins' Day," I told Peach, when she called to let me know what time she and Kathy would be by to pick me up.
There was a silence.
"To Cousins' Day?" she asked, incredulous.
"Yes, to Cousins' Day."
We had long ago decided that Cousins' Day was sacrosanct. It didn't "work" the right way if others were around. We made an exception the month Jeri joined us for High Tea, but she had come in at the end of the overnight, not at the beginning. Now I was deliberately bringing a guest to Cousins' Day and she was confused.
Suddenly, a lightbulb went off in her head.
"It must be a puppy," she said.
And indeed it was. Daisy came to Cousins' Day and was the best puppy ever and a huge hit.
I am a little jealous of the family that adopts Daisy (no, it won't be me) because she is really about the best behaved puppy at this age that we've ever had. She is so incredibly mellow, she mostly pees on newspaper, she comes when you call her (those little puppy legs going bumpity-bumpity-bump on the floor), she sleeps all night, she loves cuddling. She cries if you put her in the playpen, but stops at less than 5 minutes and just curls up with her teddy bear "Mama" and goes to sleep. She is incredibly easy to take with me...at least for now she is.
We had a wonderful Cousins' Day, of course. Peach was the big money winner in our card game (though I did win one game). I think we all had our respective "things" we were preoccupied with because that ol' boob was passed around the table like a basketball game, though by the time we had played our last game, it was mine until our next Cousins' Day.
My pumpkin martinis tasted like "more," I was told, so we had an elegant sufficiency of those, along with some cranberry Stilton I'd found recently that we gorged on before dinner.
After dinner my mother fixed ice cream cones and I gave Daisy a taste of ice cream. You could almost hear her yelling "Where have you been all my life???" She loved it and kept whining and trying to climb up my leg to get more, something she has never done before. She is a real ice cream-a-holic, I think!
(Funny how it doesn't gross me out to share ice cream with a puppy, but I wouldn't even think of it with our older dogs. Must be that sweet "puppy breath" vs. "dog breath" that makes the difference!)
We took a card playing break at one point and Kathy went in to work on my mother's current puzzle and found an interesting way to get enough light to where she could see.
"Lady Liberty"
Peach was the big winner in our marathon card game. She insists that what made the difference was we used a new deck of cards which turned out to have butterflies on them.
When our cousin Shirley was dying a couple of years ago, she told Peach, with whom she was the closest, that whenever Peach saw butterflies, to think of her. We think it's highly unfair for Peach to be getting card help from the afterlife. Harumph.
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