Mom bought some paint today. Wall paint.

Since arriving from Canada, she had fixed various stuff here at home that have been damaged by the months of heavy rain have inflicted upon this old house. Ceiling lights that have ceased to light. Wall sockets that have ceased to work. Leaky ceilings. Ceilings that threatened to crash down on you in the dead of the night.

I had gotten so used to it that, just last night, I was looking for a functioning socket to plug the desk lamp for light. Plug it anywhere, Mom said, I’ve fixed them. Then she said, Why do you bother with the lamp? Just switch the light on. I was so pleasantly surprised. I had forgotten how things were originally that way.

So anyway, Mom bought a cylindrical plastic container of mocha blanch paint. When we took the lid off it was a creamy shade of pink. Like some light strawberry cream. Good enough to eat. When Mom mixed it, some paint the shade of condensed milk surfaced, and for a moment, the paint had been a swirling strawberry-and-cream concoction. When she poured it over that base where the roller brush rested, it had the consistency of pancake batter.

The resulting shade on the wall is a pale peach so far. Eliza and Jenna wanted to paint the wall too, but Mom didn’t let them. She feared that they might ruin the wall. “I wanna be a paint-waller!” Eliza moaned. “Wall-painter,” I corrected her. “Oh,” she said. “I want to be a wall-painter!”I felt that if I were in charge, I’d letthem paint to their hearts’ content on the lower part of the wall. And let them see their handiwork, and learn something about painting firsthand. How does that sound?

It kinda makes me wanna paint my room back at Kalai. Paint it which color? Light blue? Light pink? Lemon? Should I do the painting? Do I have money to buy paint?

So there. It’s a nice, rainy day today. Eliza had been watching me as I typed this. She did the title.