The Return

The many fans of Periwinkle Chronicles who have been silently clamoring for a return to the tales of the denizens of the county some readers refer to as Persimmon County, will be delighted when they turn out the lights, and also when they learn that said denizens have returned from their unanticipated sojourn in Somalia, referred to by three-year-old Clara Wembley as “Sowhatsittoya,” having been hijacked by Somalia pirates while cruising the beautiful blue Danube while on their way to Madagascar, called “Maggie’s Gas Car” by Clara, it being Clara’s idea in the first place to take the Danube shortcut to go see the penguins of Maggie’s Gas Car, she having announced during the Joys & Concerns at Sunday worship on The Ms Hotdam that anyone who said “No” to her one more time would not be able to go to heaven, and everyone waited for Pastor Patty to meet this theological challenge, but Pastor Patty has a three-year-old herself, so she was not about to say “No” to Clara, especially since Clara was wearing a hat festooned with old tea bags that she had picked up out of her yard after a particular parade had passed by, the parade being especially loud for such a small group of paraders, even though the local Faux News Channel claimed there had been over 310 million people in the parade, which is more than the entire population of Periwinkle County, but Faux News has been known to count illegal aliens from the planet Factless, and so Clara’s nana, Kate Bates, had gone inside to escape the noise from the vuvuzelas of the soccer moms in the parade, both of them, so she did not know that Clara had not only picked up the hat but had packed it for the cruise on Ms Hotdam, so they were on their way to Maggie’s Gas Car, the capital of which, according to Clara, is Maggie’s Dish Towel, although that’s actually in Sowhatsittoya, and to secure their release had to work out an exchange with the pirates, who had become addicted to Claire Nathan’s persimmon pudding while holding the Periwinklians hostage. And so it goes…