A Sunday Visit With Family and a Friend

I spent the good part of the morning sitting on my chair in the middle of the front garden...pulling up some ground cover while talking to my family on the cell phone. This is how I keep in contact with the kids and grandkids. I learned what they have been doing and their plans for the summer. Sometimes we talk about food. Yesterday I learned that they had a new pasta machine. My son made the homemade pasta and he and the kids made fresh sauce, the youngest made bruschetta. They have fun together...cooking. They had just returned from a trip for spring break and told me lots about it. My daughter was at her 2nd home in Wisconsin...she went out on the dock and fished for the first time this year. She was cleaning up her yard and doing her favorite thing...raking....and more raking. We talk about the birds we see and we always mention our killer online scrabble game. I talked to Joe's son too. He was working on his house and cleaning yesterday, when we talked. It seems that everyone was cleaning or eating.

My neighbors were getting their pond set up for the year. They were spreading a truckload of mulch around the pond and the whole family...except Audra was pitching in. Over the fence, she told me that she didn't have to help, because she had helped the week before. She's always curious about what I'm doing. She hops, skips, and jumps around the fence to come into my yard and visit. I had worked in my front yard garden most of the morning and had just made a trip to the backyard to water the new bushes. I was finished and sat on the bench in the sun. Here she comes...full of questions. She wants to help me. I find some little things for her to do. Her Dad calls over the fence, why does she help you and here at home...she doesn't want to? I told him that I had magic powers. Kids always love to help the neighbors and not their parents so much. I'm older and slower...things travel at a snail's pace sometimes. I don't have to accomplish so much in a day's time...unlike her parents who have tons of things to do. She and I can just sit on the bench and wonder....why do bees like flowers, why do some birds live in houses and others build nests, why do I like the woods, what is my favorite color, and finally...how do dandelions spread and why doesn't Joe like them? She says that she loves them and thinks they are pretty. We talked about all these things and then she brought me my pruners. "How do you open them?" she asked. I showed her and thinking that she was really old enough to learn how to carry and use them, I started explaining about them. "Why is one blade smaller than the other?"I told her that these are bypass garden pruners.They make a cut using two curved blades that bypass each other the same as scissors. One blade is sharpened on the outside edge and it slips by a thicker unsharpened blade. "OH" she said. "Can I use them for a minute?" Since I was watching, I thought that there would be no harm. "Be very careful...this is a grownup thing to do." She proceeded to go to a patch of dandelions with her bucket and pruners. She sat down and said, "Come on over and sit on the ground." (groan) I did as she asked and watched while she cut the flowers off several dandelions and dropped them in her bucket. I said, "Audra, why are you cutting the flowers off?" She said, "Joe doesn't like them...I'm cutting off the flowers so he can't see them from the house and they won't bother him."

Balisha :)