“Unless Paul can come up with something,” grumbled Tim as he stared into Mrs. Hodgson's dressing mirror. “That's me from now on.”
He frowned at the frumpy, plump, nervous looking adult woman in the mirror.
“I've got to do something to get my mind off all this,” sighed Tim. “Maybe I should go and tackle some of Mrs. Hodgson's chores.”
Tim lifted the dirty clothes hamper in the Hodgson's master bedroom and unceremoniously dumped its contents onto the king size bed. He then began sorting the dirty clothes of Paul's mom and dad according to color, separating the lights from the darks, in preparation to do laundry.
“Paul, you'd better pull a rabbit from your metaphorical magic hat,” Tim grumbled to himself while sifting through a mound of Mrs. Hodgson's underwear. “Because there is no way I'm going on a romantic anniversary dinner with some old dude.”
Completing his sorting task, Tim grabbed a stack of the rumpled, dirty clothes, piled them into a laundry basket, and carried the load off to the Hodgson's laundry facilities located in the basement.
“Getting laundry started already hon?” asked Paul's dad as Tim passed by.
“Uh... yeah... honey dear... sweetie... uh... sweetie-kins,” Tim mumbled as he hurriedly slipped past Frank Hodgson and escaped into the depths of the basement.
The air smelled moist, stale, and dank as Tim walked down the creaky set of old, wooden stairs. The light switch was inconveniently located at the very base of the stairs, so Tim had to descend into the darkness of this relatively unknown cellar before he could even turn on the lights.
“Stupid engineering on somebody's part,” he whispered to himself.
At the bottom of the basement stairs, Tim flipped on the lights and gasped as the enormity of the Hodgson's basement. It was the length and width of the foundation of the entire house, but all laid out as one single, gigantic room. And the room was stacked, practically from floor to ceiling, with clutter! Sloppy, irregularly piled towers of cardboard boxes dominated the room, punctuated by periodic mounds of old children's toys, bicycles, broken wheelbarrows, and outdated computers from decades long past.
“No wonder Paul has a magic book,” Tim said to himself. “I wouldn't be surprised to learn the Ark of the Covenant is hidden in one of these boxes.”
Although on further inspection, Tim discovered most of the boxes were innocuously labeled as Christmas decorations, Halloween decorations, Easter decorations, Fourth of July decorations, Veteran's Day decorations, Flag Day decorations, and so forth.
“Crazy family of pack-rats,” grumbled Tim. “And unless Paul can find a reversal spell, I'm now Mrs. Pack-Rat, aren't I?”
As if cued by Tim's passing comment regarding rodents, a tiny gray mouse suddenly darted across the concrete floor of the basement, hurriedly scurrying from a hiding hole amidst one pile of boxes into another in a nearby stack of folding chairs, broken umbrellas, and leaky garden hoses.
“Eek!” shrieked Tim, genuinely surprised at his own fearful reaction to the harmless creature. Mrs. Hodgson's emotions must have been influencing him. Nonetheless, Tim lost his balanced, dropped the load of laundry, and fell backwards into one of the towering piles of cardboard boxes.