Sunday Gambol

We were not thrilled to hear from our grandchild that she and her girlfriend, in a rural setting, having been driven to a small town a fifteen-minute drive from her girlfriend's family farm, decided to walk back to the farm, over a rural country road. Granted, they've finally become teens (another three weeks for our granddaughter, two days ago for her friend) and are moderately responsibly mature, but urban dwellers like us see danger in two young girls walking alone like that. Traffic, she assured us, was light, and it only took them an hour or so, saving her friend's mother the bother of having to pick them up.

Guess we'll just have to learn to live with the fact that teens need to feel themselves a little independent at times, to make decisions for themselves. In another era, perhaps, that little bit of independence equating now to a greater social vulnerability under certain conditions, was the norm. There was not at an earlier time, a thought of danger lurking everywhere, ready to spring upon unwary and trusting people, young and old. Those were the 'good old days' if, in fact, they ever existed as memory fondly informs us they did.

As for us, another beautiful and satisfying day of activity. Every facet of our quotidian existence seems to be infused with little dollops of beauty, from the heavenly fragrance of the banks of lilies-of-the-valley at the side of the house, wafting their superbly heady essence on the breeze to wherever we happen to be, even through open house windows, to the fabulous trill of a male cardinal on the spire of an old spruce, and then from the very top of a roof, untiringly trilling his paean to this late-spring day.

The rhododendrons are a scarlet blaze of bundled blossoms, never ceasing to amaze us with the freshness and beauty of their floral display. The tree peonies are beginning their luscious blooms, the flower heads heavy with the manifold delicately layered petals, pink on one, the other yellow, soft colours for softly delicate, but huge flowers that leave us breathless with admiration and regretful at their too-short appearance in the garden. I'm determined to clean up the trees of their unproductive branches, and have filled a large compost bag with twigs from the caragenas, the mulberries, the Japanese maple, the purple smoke-tree.

Attention to these details are vital to the health of the bushes and trees, just as separating the beds of lilies and irises after they've been left undisturbed for years must be tackled, and the lilies will be, this coming fall. They're encroaching on other areas of the garden in their enthusiasm for expansion and overtaking new territory, crowding out hostas which require the courtesy of their own room to please us with their large and showy leafage before blooming out themselves with tall stalks of flowers.

All the furniture that had been temporarily removed from the new deck due to a need to paint it with stain and preservative has now been restored to their positions of usefulness. Our favourite, the two-seater glider, perfect for a relatively small deck, the two chairs, the table, and of course the barbecue which has given us such good service the last two decades, hooked up directly to the house gas line. And voila! the work of taking apart the old deck and building the new one has now been completed.

Our early afternoon ravine walk was not without its own satisfactions, and a little bit of surprise as well, since once the sun hid behind an increasing cloud cover it became surprisingly cool. An ambiance beloved of mosquitoes and other nuisance pests, which did their best to disabuse us of the notion that we were enjoying ourselves. They didn't quite succeed, but they were a nuisance. For some odd reason they love Button and steer wide of Riley; likely their different hormones, perhaps their colour.

Home afterward, hung up for a while talking with neighbours, two of whom explained that they had gone for a walk in the ravine earlier themselves, and had got hopelessly lost.