It was meant to be a reward. A celebration. A wind up party for twenty-two, six year olds at the end of grade one. Miss. Glassow walked the children down the labrynth of lanes behind the neighbourhood houses to Maple Grove park for an end of the school year party. There were no parent volunteers. Just Miss. Glassow and her class. We had our lunches on the vast clover covered grass at the park. I remember two specific things about the day.

One, is that the route we children traveled, as we walked two by two through the lanes, passed right behind my house. I remember looking up to our kitchen window from the lane thinking Grandma was inside and didn’t know I was walking past. The second, and honestly, I shit you not, I remember this distinctly, one of the little girls said to me at lunch that she couldn’t sit on the grass cause her Mom said that sitting on the grass would give her hemorrhoids.

E has finished staining the bunkie. Tomorrow, we start to put the lattice around the underside. We need to discourage cute smelly little otter from moving in. We have a lot of lattice panels. I am hoping there will be some left over for my garden. We were told that if we paint the lattice black it will disappear into the shadows of the building. So we will paint it black and by then I should think we should be ready to also finish painting everything else in the cabin that needs to be painted.

No sign of Bobby at our place recently. We miss him. As a clear indicator that life here has slowed down, I have read two books this week as I have waited on the deck for him. Thank you Jan for the tulips. They are beautiful.

It has been a long time since I have taken that kind of time for such lazy pursuits. But I have weeded the heck out of the garden and there is not much else I can do up there until it is time to plant the rest of the vegetables.

It will come as no surprise that I think that the little girl I lunched with in grade three lived with her parents until she was almost forty. I think of her every time I plunk myself down on the ground to weed the garden, rearrange border rocks, or watch wild life in the water beneath the cliff. I do a lot of sitting on the ground when I am puttering in the garden or watching wildlife.

Every time I am about to plop my little sit me down on the ground to weed, I think of that little girl and her mother’s words of warning. But fifty five years later I continue

to live dangerously