Golden Afternoon

Funny moment on Sunday:

On a car ride back from my cousin's wedding in San Marcos, the kids were doing something in the back seat that Eli and I weren't really paying attention to, until talk got a little louder. When we tuned in, Colin had just handed Hallie a single sunflower petal.

Her response was over-the-top gratitude, "Oh, thank you, that's so very kind of you!" She petted the petal, holding it to her cheek, murmuring lovingly to it.

Meanwhile, Colin had a double handful of petals, which he was muttering over in a voice that was half-Golem, half-crazy-prospector--"It's gold. Gold, I tell you!!"--while shaking his flowery fists to the roof of the car in triumph.

And the thing was, the petals had come from the wedding bouquet which the bride had bestowed on Hallie the night before. Colin was intensely jealous of this--being so keenly attuned to injustice as it pertains to things his sister gets and he doesn't--so he had ripped the heads off about four sunflowers, denuded them, and then, perhaps feeling a distant twinge of something vaguely like guilt, gave back a single petal. Which she adored beyond reason, because her beloved big brother gave her something (a tragically rare occurrence), never realizing that they were ALL hers by rights.

And when did he learn about crazy prospectors, anyway??