I set a stone bowl full of river water onto the hot surface and put the frog legs into it. Little Sister checks the frog skin sizzling on the griddle and decides that it's done. Taking the crispy piece of skin I rip it in half and give half to her, chewing on the leathery hide myself while we wait for the rest of our dinner to cook. A nurse walks by, pushing an old person in a wheel chair and I look up in time to see her watching us with an amused smile on her face. I smile back, feeling a little silly but happy. Sure I'm eighteen. Sure we're cooking an imaginary jungle dinner on a park bench. Sure we're probably getting a little too loud for a nursing home setting... but I'm having fun.
Walking into the nursing home earlier that morning, following our parents, Little Sister and I were instantly drawn to the two fish tanks and a miniature scene set up in the waiting room. Again on the move down long hallways, following a nurse's directions, passing wheel chaired old ladies and scrub clad young ladies, I anticipated a long morning of sitting in a small, cramped hospital-like room with the feeling of slowing suffocating under long and boring adult talk. So when the hallways opened up into a spacious jungle complete with fake cactus, fake palm trees, fake flowers, and a real waterfall and stream, Little Sister and I could only gasp, taking surprisingly fresh air into our lungs. I spoke for both of us when I said to Mom in an awed, suppressed excitement voice "Can we stay here the whole time!?" With Mom's approval, we both scampered off to explore this wondrous indoor rainforest. We discovered miniature golf holes and played a few rounds with imaginary clubs and balls, both deciding where the other's ball ended up rolling (which as you can imagine, lead to some heated - but still toned down - debates over each other's motives in only having a ball roll a short ways.) Snickering, I pointed out to Little Sister a sign that read "Do Not Climb on Walls," which I had to point out to her that the humor lay in the fact that it was in a nursing home where every single person we'd seen so far was in wheel chairs. Then she laughed. Eventually, tired of imaginary golf (and very real arguments with the referees), walking around and looking at things, and sitting and talking, our imaginations suddenly caught the same spark of inspiration.
We were stranded in a jungle when our airplane went down. Everyone else had died, including our parents, so, much like Robinson Crusoe, we had no desire to leave our island of paradise.
Quickly mapping out our living quarters, beds and kitchen (placed by the fresh water stream), we part ways to hunt. It would be my turn to kill animals; she would be the one gathering veggies and fruit, we decide. Looking up into a towering palm tree that has become to me a moss covered, vine entangled rainforest tree, I freeze, staring straight into the eyes of a native monkey. My thoughts? It might be illegal, but this is our island and we need food to survive. Funny my thoughts turned to the politics of the situation. Slowly, barely breathing, I reach for my hunting blade strapped to my belt. "What are you doing?" Little Sister walks up and startles me and the monkey. It vanishes
"Great! You scared the monkey off!" I sigh disappointedly.
"Oh well, monkey meat tastes terrible." I walk with her a bit through the mossy jungle.
“No it doesn't, I love it! And that would've been enough meat to last us a week." We part ways again, since she has a distaste for killing things and her chatter keeps scaring away my prey. On my own I manage to stab a large frog and pin a squirrel right to a tree trunk with my knife throwing skills. Still, I decide that it's probably about time I figure out how to make myself a bow. Little Sister joins me at our place, dragging a bag of strawberries behind her. Instructing her to start the fire for our oven, I set to the work of skinning and gutting the squirrel. Food eventually cooked to perfection (in an unscientifically fast amount of time) we eat our squirrel drumsticks while contemplating how difficult it would be to figure out a jungle's substitute for ranch.
Yup, this is how Little Sister and I spent our morning in the middle of a nursing home.
 |
| TheIntuitiveLife |
No comments:
Post a Comment