Tonight we had fish and green beans with a side of hysterical laughter

It began when mom said, "It scared the wits out of me. I haven't had a single wit since."

And Mark said something about someone having lice and having to get the wits picked off his head.

And I said, "Hey! That isn't a real pun. It's a slant pun. Kind of like slant rhyme."

Mom didn't know what I meant by slant rhyme and Mark and I tried to explain using Emily Dickinson, but we couldn't think of any specific examples. I started trying to quote the first Dickinson poem that came into my head in the hope that it would contain one, only I didn't get very far because I started to say, "I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a bee," and started giggling uncontrollably because, of course, I had mixed up Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" with Dickinson's "To make a prairie..."

It was all downhill from there.

Joie