Collude

Today’s word of the day is collude, which is an intransitive verb which means to act together through a secret understanding, esp. with evil or harmful intent; to conspire in a fraud; to plot.

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Before we were teens, my younger brother, Luke and I, would collude, on a regular basis, in plots of devilish intent, with the ultimate goal of transferring blame for our exploits on our younger sister Annie; yet it was generally an extraordinarily successful day when we could get her in trouble and emerge unscathed. Our success rate was dismal, in part, because Annie never inherited the dumb gene that should have passed from her blond hair to her brain. In fact, I would guess that Annie transposed more blame onto us, for plots she herself had engineered, than we were ever able to competently maneuver her way. But another hindrance to the success of our exploits was my brother’s tendency to panic, and blunder into guilt ridden confessions, complete with detailed descriptions that encompassed all but the most insignificant minutia of our plot, after receiving only the merest of questioning glances from my mother. But my sister, seemingly with no such limitations of conscience, and the ability to stare down a raging bull while clothed in red, could vehemently deny any involvement in wrong doing without the slightest hint of guile; I must admit she was smooth. Some days it was only my daydreams of ultimate retribution that fought my urge to pull her thin blond pigtails off her head, particularly on those occasions when she would covertly smirk at me and then turn, ever so innocently, and ask my mother, in her stuttering hiccup verge-of-crying voice, why Luke and I were always picking on her.

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P.S. Annie - You know you are my hero and I love you bunches… now. :-)

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