Mom and Dad Driving around in an SPF-60 Coniferous Bush

Photocredit.

We're back from vacation. The property our whole family rented by Lake George featured a small patio positioned on top of a hill a ways from the house. The thing with 13-year-olds is that their piercing shrieks carry over surprisingly long distances. Luckily I have tinnitus and enjoy me a nice deck chair.

Mom and Dad (otherwise known as M & D) parked their little Prius in the driveway by the front door of the house. Turns out, it was also parked right underneath a sprawling pine tree. While packing up the cars to leave, D bustles about looking busy and irritated. He flicks the windshield.

I ask him what he's doing.

"There's pine sap all over the car. And bird shit. And the pine needles are sticking to it."

"Was this intentional?" I ask.

D makes one of his Dad Faces where he tightens up his mouth and presses down his eyebrows.

"Maybe you will come to appreciate driving around camouflaged as a bush," I say. "A coniferous bush."

M comes out and points to all the white sunscreen smeared on the bumper. "That was you," she tells D. "I rub in my sunscreen."

D circles the car and we all inspect the swirls of white zinc oxide decorating pretty much the whole back of the car underneath the forest-encrusted hatchback. 

Tom approaches. "Good God," he says. "That's a lot of SPF."

M repeats her accusation that D does not adequately rub in sunscreen. She opens the passenger door to get in the car. There's sunscreen smeared all over the doorframe.

Tom asks, "Ummmm, and whose sunscreen is that?"

M stutters out a half coherent half a sentence. She pauses. "Thanks, Tom," she says, but she doesn't sound all that thankful honestly. D rarely rides shotgun.

D gets in the driver's side proclaiming that he needs to stop and get some alcohol. He read on the internet that alcohol removes pine sap and birdshit.

They drive off in their bush.