Helen Belden was perturbed, and bordering on angry.
She had set out her good, white cotton, 1800 thread count Egyptian bed sheets that she saved for using on the guest room bed when Alicia was planning a visit. Alicia wasn’t complimentary of a lot of things, but Helen knew she coveted those bed sheets because they were so soft and she would be certain to make comparisons to the Princess and the Pea if they weren’t on the bed.
Her search was interrupted when Bobby asked her to tie an eye patch around his head. He was excited to play pirates with Larry and Terry.
She returned to look through the linen closet again, in case one of the kids had returned them to the shelf. She was sure that Trixie knew the importance of those sheets, and that she would return them to the shelf rather than admit the onslaught of her least favorite aunt. No, they absolutely were not in the closet.
Bobby barged in again, this time to ask for safety pins. She supposed that they needed the pins to get their pirate costumes just right.
After she satisfied Bobby once again, she continued down to the laundry room and checked both the washer and the dryer in case the sheets had been dripped or spilled on and then placed in the washer.
Bobby came running into the kitchen to shout that the pirates were thirsty, and needed a bottle of rum so they could sing, “Dead Mans Chest, Yo Ho Ho and a bottle of Rum”. Fortunately, she convinced him to settle for a thermos of koolaid instead.
After making sure once again that the sheets were not in the guest room, Helen decided to go to the kitchen to sweep the floor. Sweeping was a relatively mindless activity that would allow her to think about finding the sheets without concentrating on the other task at hand. She supposed that she could hand the mystery of the missing sheets over to Trixie but she really didn’t want to put up with the moaning that was sure to occur when her daughter learned of the impending visit.
However, when she opened the broom closet, she discovered that both her broom and her mop were missing. As she turned to shut the broom closet door, she happened to get a good look out the kitchen window and she saw that the boys had dragged the portable basketball goal to the end of the picnic table.
“What on earth are Larry and Terry doing to that goal post,” she wondered. “It looks like they are tieing dowel rods across the top of the basket. Wait a minute, those aren’t dowel rods, those are the handles to my mop and broom.”
Suddenly, all the events of the afternoon came together as Helen burst through the back door.
“Robert Andrew Belden, you better not be poking safety pins through my Egyptian sheets for the sail of your pirate ship or I will keelhaul your backside across each of the seven seas!”
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