Estelle does not like coffee. Estelle
does not like loud people in the morning. Estelle does not like
cats that sit on your fresh clothes in the morning and leave
big fuzzballs everywhere. Estelle is not happy in the morning.
Her mother smiles, her father grins,
Sydney the dog is ready to romp. But Estelle is a slow, sad person
in the morning. Her hair is all rumpled and bent. Her eyes are
still twisted in three different directions from that strange
dream about shopping. Estelle does not like mirrors.
Estelle does not like boys. They are
too bumpy and bossy. They always have to have their way. All
the boys except Sammy. He's not so bad because he lets Estelle
read his books about outer space and 1000 Stupid Jokes. Like
where do dogs go when they die. Or how many oranges can a basketball
player eat. Or when does a tree dance. Sammy has a thousand of
them.
Estelle likes feathers. She likes them
on birds and she likes them off birds. But she would not like
to kill a bird just to get its feathers. Estelle is patient.
She will wait for them to fall like leaves. Sometimes she wanders
out to collect them - mostly brown and grey feathers, but sometimes
a perfect white feather shows up. Once she found a bright orange
feather and wondered what kind of bird would have this. Then
her mother told her that this was just a chicken feather dyed
orange for someone's Indian costume. She kept it - but down at
the bottom of her feather box.
What about the tiny bugs, the little
lice that live on bird feathers? Do they make her itch? No, they
do not.