He winks at me. “Bet you can’t say the same thing about old Mr. Darcy, can you?”
There are actually a lot of things I can say about Professor West that I can’t say about Mr. Darcy, and all the descriptions are both flattering and very well deserved. Not that I’ll tell Dean that right now.
“Hey, where’s Nicholas?” I hold up the pirate shirt. “I need him to try this on.”
Dean picks up a walkie-talkie from the coffee table and speaks into it. “Ahoy, Dread Pirate West, the pirate queen requires your presence on deck immediately. Savvy?”
He releases the button, and a crackly static comes from the speaker before Nicholas replies, “Aye, bucko. I’m on me way.”
There’s a thumping noise from upstairs before our six-year-old son comes barreling down the stairs and into the kitchen, pirate sword in hand.
“Ahoy, me hearties!” He stops beside me, pushing his eye patch up to his forehead. “You know, I really need a good ship, like a brigantine.”
Dean and I exchange amused looks over the reminder that our son has a far more extensive knowledge of pirate ships, crews, and weapons than either of us do. Not that Nicholas’s fascination with history surprises me, given his paternal lineage.
“Or even a fort,” Nicholas adds, adjusting his hat. “Pirates don’t hide out in closets. They just don’t.”
“We’ll come up with something,” Dean promises. “Maybe in the basement, so you can pillage and plunder during winter.”
“Come here and try these on, captain.” I hold out the knee-length pants and buccaneer shirt with billowed sleeves.
Nicholas strips out of his sweatpants and T-shirt and then lets me help him put on the pirate shirt and pants. I fuss with the fit and pin the hem on the pants, then have him try on the red sash.
“Okay, scallywag, get your regular clothes back on.” I ease the pirate shirt over his head and spread it out again on the central island.
“Where’s Bella?” Nicholas asks, pulling on his sweatpants. “I need her to be my prisoner.”
“Still napping.” I glance at the clock. “If she’s not up by two, I’ll wake her.”
“Dad, will you be my prisoner?” Nicholas goes into the sunroom.
“Well…” Dean sighs gustily and puts his tablet aside before slowly straightening. “I guess I could be a prisoner…but you’ll have to capture me first, ye lily-livered swine.”
He leaps up, shoving his feet into a pair of shoes by the sliding glass door before escaping into the garden. Nicholas grabs his sword and hurries to put his shoes on.
“Ye scurvy dog,” he shouts. “Yer doom be at hand!”
He rushes into the garden after Dean, and they start racing around the house and into the wooded lot beyond the garden, hurling pirate insults at each other and laughing.
As I return my attention to Nicholas’s costume, I have a moment of pure gratitude that feels as beautiful and perfect as a soap bubble.
Since returning to Mirror Lake from Paris over a year ago, our family has lived a life of happy chaos filled with scrambles to “get ready,” bustling shifts at the café, lectures about World Heritage sites, first-grade music performances, picture books, finger paints, snow days, and long weekends running errands and playing at Wizard’s Park.
A life filled with both change and lovely sameness. I’ve finally learned that life is all about those things existing side by side, like a pathway curving alongside an ever-moving river. Sometimes you take one route, sometimes the other, but both will move you forward.
I finish getting Nicholas’s costume put together—I only have the vest left to make—and go upstairs to wake our three-year-old daughter, who zonked out after our morning trip to a pumpkin farm, which included a hayride, apple cider, and a great deal of traipsing around the pumpkin patch.
As it turns out, Bella is already awake, lounging in bed with her stuffed animals. Brown-eyed with wavy brown hair, my daughter has a touch of wildness in her.
She climbs trees, catches bugs, paints pictures of stick-figure dragons, and makes entire buffets out of mud. She likes cowgirls rather than princesses, stuffed tigers instead of dolls, and if there is dirt somewhere to be found, it will invariably end up on her rosy cheeks.
I love her madly.
“Hey sweetie.” I lift her into my arms, breathing in her scent of strawberry shampoo. “Want to come try on your Halloween costume?”
“Okay.” She holds up her stuffed owl. “Cupcake for Hoot too?”