Me: Um. What?
Son: It's for language arts. I need to write something we've done over the last six weeks that's creative.
Me: I can't think of anything. Crap. I mean, we must've done something creative, right?
Son: No.
Me: Well, I don't know. Think of something. I have to work, honey. You know that.
Son: Mom!
Me: [putting aside my laptop, swearing I won't forget what it was I was doing before this hundredteenth interruption] Well, okay. Creative. Sure we've been creative. We've... well, we've cooked. A lot. Three meals a day.
Son: That's not creative. Besides, I haven't done it. When school closed, you said I'd have to help you with the cooking, but I think I complained too much so you gave up and stopped making me.Me: Well, yeah. Okay. I'll get better at that.
Son: So? What have we done that's creative?
Me: [Desperate] Write about last Saturday when we drove up to the farm to see your grandmother and grandfather and Aunt Leah and your cousins, and Leah and I decided we wanted to find that fallen-down 18th-century cemetery we'd stumbled across when we were kids, so we set off toward the wildlife area across from Killbuck Creek, just down the road from the farm, and we made you and your cousin Carli come along, so the four of us traipsed across a field of dried foxtail and briars and thorns, but we couldn't find the cemetery in the place I was certain—certain!—it would be, so we turned north, digging and high-stepping through the woods, but there was still no cemetery, and you and Carli gave up and went back to the road, where she turned a hundred cartwheels, and then you realized you'd lost your phone but we followed our steps backward and found it, by some freakin' miracle, in the briars near that fallen-down oak, and then we went back to the farm and told your grandmother we couldn't find the cemetery, and she told us we looked in the wrong place—it's closer to the road, she said, down the hill by the crossroad by the creek—and then as we were standing there, someone saw a tick on my neck, and then we realized we all had ticks, and you were creeped out, so you went into the barn to shake out your clothes while I just picked them off myself, one by one, including one literally in my bellybutton and a couple beneath my waistband, about ten total, I think, and your grandmother somehow had a pack of matches in her pocket, probably from the Camels she sneaks in the pottery studio when she thinks no one will notice, so I took them and tore off the matches and lit them burned the ticks to death, one by one, and I left their dead bodies on the bed of your grandfather's rebuilt '78 Chevy pickup, where they'll stay until he drives it somewhere, at which point the tick corpses will blow off into Holmes County somewhere.
Son: That's not creative.
Me: It is. Write about it. If your teacher says that's not creative, I'll give you ten bucks.
Son: Swear?
We shook on it.
