Raking with Wilbur and Clara

     Last week was stiflingly hot.  Then, a few days ago, a massive wind storm blew in.  The air turned cooler, almost cold, as the wind roared against the house.  There were gusts of greater than 60 miles per hour.  When it was all said and done, the front and back yards were littered with pine cones and tree branches.
   Clara and I decided to rake up the debris.  I brought out her kid-sized gardening tools and showed her how to rake tree seeds and pine cones from the concrete patio into her shovel and then put them into her wheelbarrow.  It was interesting work, she thought, but what I was doing was more interesting.
     "I'm raking sticks and branches into a pile to throw away," I said.
     "'ticks," she said.  She grabbed the biggest one in the pile and pulled hard.  She would help me out by taking care of that big stick.
     "I don't think it's going to fit in the trash bag like that.  Why don't I hold it and you step on it to break it?  Here, put your foot right here." She put her little baby shoe on it and I pulled until it snapped.  She made a sound of deep satisfaction.
     Wilbur wandered over and laid down in the grass in the sunshine.
     "Oh, hi, doggie!  Yes, yes," Clara said, patting his rump.  She turned one of his ears inside-out and stroked it carefully between her palms.  "Ee-ya," she said.  "Ee-ya."  Then she lavished him with a series of high-pitched croons.
     Wilbur lifted a fleshy eyebrow.  He seemed to be debating baring his tummy to her.  On the one hand, she might scratch it. There was nothing better than getting a tummy scratch in the warm sunshine. On the other, she might sit on it.
      Finally, the deliciousness of the possibility was too much and he rolled onto his side to bare his tummy.  His roundness and the way he was reclining made him seem like a woman from a Rubens painting.  Clara stood above him, contemplating what to do.
     "Do you know what scratching is? It's what you do when you have a bug bite." I showed her how to scratch Wilbur's tummy.  As I bent down, she reached up and pulled my sunglasses off and put them on her face, upside-down.  Then she tried to put them on Wilbur's face.  It was a frustrating endeavor.  She knew they should go over his eyes, but then his ears were way up high, and she couldn't get the sunglasses to hook them.  It was all wrong, but she couldn't figure out why.
     She tried it a couple times, almost poking Wilbur in the eye. He winced and made a soft, high-pitched moan in the back of his throat.
     "Clara, do you remember the wind?" I asked, and I held my arms out, swayed and and shook my hair.  I tried to make the high-pitched sound of wind blowing through trees. Luckily, she caught what I was trying to imitate.  She chuckled and pointed at the big elm tree in our backyard.