Love and Muddy Puddles by Cecily Anne Paterson

me.
    Out of town? Down a fire trail? And the road gets cut off?  My back got straighter and straighter. Could this be any worse at all?
    Oh, yes. Oh, yes, it definitely could.
    “Dad, where’s the house?” asked Charlie. “Is that the end of the photos? They don’t have any pictures of the house.”
    Dad’s eyes lit up. He looked like a little boy about to open a long-awaited Christmas present.
    “Well, this is the best bit. There is no house!”
    We looked at him blankly.
    “We’re going to build it ourselves!” he exulted, throwing his hands out wide as if he was inviting us all to the best party in the world.
    “Oh my goodness!” said Charlie, but she was smiling.
    “This is awesome!” yelled Josh.
    “Oh, David,” said Mum. “This is your dream, isn’t it! You’ve always wanted to do this—and now you are!” She actually hugged him. They looked at each other with dewy eyes and then, urrrgh, they kissed on the lips.  Spare me, Mum and Dad. That’s disgusting. Parents should not kiss.
    “I said there were no pigs in the shed. So we can clean it out and live there,” Dad said, his words practically falling out of his mouth with excitement. I just about fell off my chair. But it didn’t seem to stop him talking. “It has power and water and we can set up a camp kitchen. And the house shouldn’t take too long to build if we all do it together. Maybe half a year?”
    That was it. I’d had enough. Dad started burbling on about  passive solar this and that, own vegie patch blah blah, yada yada, mud bricks, compost toilet, eco-friendly ra ra ra, completely self-sufficient.  And from the looks of it, everyone else thought he wasn’t crazy. He’d obviously infected them with some greenie-wildlife-warrior virus that I was (thankfully) immune to. Or he’d turned into some sort of magician/cult leader/crazy man and they’d all been brainwashed. There was no other explanation.
    I had to say something. I had to put a stop to this insanity.
    Rather than tears and yelling and protests, which obviously hadn’t worked the first time, I decided to try to knock holes in his arguments.
    “Dad,” I said. “It sounds lovely.” I stretched out the word laah-ve-ly as long as I could. “But really. I don’t think this is going to work. You want us all to live in a pig shed,” and here I shuddered for effect, “for six months while we all build a house out of mud. But the fact is, we...” and I gestured to Charlie, Josh and myself, “...need to go to school. We just won’t have time to help build a house, however environmentally-friendly and wonderful and all that stuff it is. Plus, if it  does  rain and the road  does  get cut off, we’ll have to miss days. And I know you think getting a good education is the best thing we can do to have a good start to our lives, right?”
    I looked around with the warmest, friendliest expression on my face that I could muster. The image I wanted to send was of a girl who loved school so much that she couldn’t bear to miss even an hour.
    “So, even though it’s a really great adventure,” and here I put on a super-smiley face and made my voice sensible and comforting, “I just don’t think it’s practical. Maybe we should just go for a holiday to a farm. That would be fun.”
    “Come here Coco,” said Dad, still smiling. He patted the cushion of the sofa he was sitting on and made like he wanted to hug me. I cringed stiffly away.
    “I have an even bigger surprise for all of you,” he said. “How would it be to take a year off school? We can home-school while we get the farm set up and the house built. It’ll be a huge education in heaps of ways. You guys can help build in the day time and then we’ll do catch up school lessons at night. We won’t have a TV or the internet for a while, so you won’t have anything else to do.”
    I felt ill. My head was spinning and my heart was pounding. No TV? No internet?  Home school?  Was my dad insane? What