summer 1981 - it's half timing and the other half's luck

[ofthecubs]

It isn't going to last forever.

Summer doesn't last forever, after all. Yes, it's only June, but it'll be September again before he blinks. Being a child, his father often tells him with rough affection, doesn't last forever either. Yes, he's only ten, but in the blink of an eye, he'll be twelve and he'll be sixteen and he'll be twenty and if he doesn't start working now, he won't be King of anything. It had gotten much harder to disregard when he thought about the fact Max was already half-way to twelve as well; that Toby was up and about and very much his own person when he'd just moments ago been too small for his brothers to be allowed to hold.

It isn't going to last forever. That means they need to make the best of it.

And he does have vague plans for the afternoon. Some time will be for Andrew and for running like lunatics through the fields. Some time will be for Rachel and Argine, for building on the hesitant sort of truce they've come upon as 'cooties' stop being such a pressing concern. Some time will be for his brothers, for watching them play, for keeping them safe; for just being close before he blinks and they're all too grown up for fun.

But for now, Edgar Eicheln is making the best of being sprawled, entirely comfortably, on the side of a small hill near the lake. The sky's blue, the wind's cool, and the contentment in his heart is fairly complete.

Summer/Fall 1983 - in the usual way

[readytoroar]

It's a natural sort of thing, of course, to be worried. It's entirely regular and completely normal.

And the Eichelns are, after all, an entirely regular and completely normal family. Charles is an entirely normal number of years older than his wife. Lorraine has given him, after all, a completely regular number of sons spaced at appropriate intervals. The boys are growing tall and bright and beyond the pale exactly the sort of children any Clubs family would be proud to smooth down the hair of and call their own.

So being worried as her eldest's twelfth birthday draws near is just an extension of that normalcy. It would have been far more odd if Lorraine wasn't worried that Edgar wouldn't throw himself with absolute immediacy--still so much a child in her eyes, still so much the little boy she felt she'd held swaddled in her arms just a heartbeat ago--into the sort of Challenges which had been known, on occasion, to take good Club boys away from their mothers and fathers and brothers.

If anyone, therefore, happened to be looking for her on the first chilly day toward the end of August, they would find Lorraine Eicheln baking rather purposefully in the Clubs kitchen.