Devious Drizzle Dodgers

A fall mystery presented itself.  The kids were coming home from school, fresh off the bus, with little or no signs of being wet from the rain...and not just any rain, Oregon rain.  It took me a few days of consecutive afternoon showers to notice they were arriving home bone dry.  I was originally trying to gauge how sorry to feel for my poor helpless kids, whom I was forcing to fend for themselves under the harsh aquatic assaults of mother nature each afternoon as they dashed the length of our driveway to the warm shelter of home.

They were so dry in fact, that I wondered if they'd smuggled umbrellas with them.  Umbrellas are the sort of sissy contraptions true Oregonians shun.  We leave them to the folks in California or back on the East Coast...and other places around the globe where apparently it's not fashionable to look like a drowned dog. (though I've seen a rash of these contraptions infecting southern Oregon as more people move here from the aforementioned fashion-conscious areas.)  The thought of my children using an umbrella, well, this was an alarming activity that would have to be purged as a bad habit, should it be true.

Fearing the worst, I asked them one day, just how they were threading the gauntlet of droplets and getting home so unscathed...turned out, it was not umbrellas after all.  Whew!  Though the truth may actually be worse.  No surprise, it's that my kids are major scheme-ers.

They explained to me that they are the last kids to be dropped off in the afternoon, and after they get dropped off, the bus driver waves them across the road and continues on down the highway until he reaches an old weigh station for trucks where he can turn the bus around and head back into town.  Seeing opportunity, Connor and Chloe convinced the driver to save himself some time and just head up our driveway and see if the giant bus could turn around on our circle.  He fell for it!!  And now, they get dropped off right at the front walkway every stinkin' day.

I waited to confirm their story and sat out on the porch the following day and waited.  Sure enough, these dang lazy kids are getting dropped off right in front of the house!  Bunch of country kids livin' it up like they're city folk!  Devious Devils.  Mystery solved.