5.4.20 Picnic Lunch
And so I cut up three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and placed them neatly in tupperware. After a morning learning the difference between an alligator and crocodile, we were ready to spring into the glorious sunshine of the fourth of May. Just getting out the door was the biggest hurdle” Do you have your shoes on? Where is your helmet? Did you go potty before we leave? Where’s your jacket? You can finish that origami project when we get back!
There were workers at the church’s Sacred Garden so we rode and found a grassy knoll up from the street in the little park down the street. We could see all kinds of dog walkers coming and going as we spread out our blanket. It was one of those moments when you can’t help remarking numerous times on how beautiful it is outside and how very nice it is to be on a picnic together. “In the top 5” we all agreed of best picnics that we had ever put on. Little helicopters leaves spun to the ground as the winds took deep breath–the sky agreed with a sigh: this is just delightful.
I considered that I wouldn’t be sitting here if it weren’t for pandemic on a Monday afternoon. There were all the masks passing by. There was the closed Carriage House building with Lenten wreaths (!) still hanging.
And the Mama Duck, “Annie” that we had spied on last week was no where to be seen. We noticed the little divet of her nest in the mulch by the stone. There were small fluffy feathers lining the shallow hole. We hoped that Annie had hatched the eggs over the weekend before the torrential rain of last evening. We imagined the little goslings waddling to nearby Lake Kittamaqundi.
Before biking home, we revived our chalking. This time, decking the front steps with dots.
It was worth it–all the corraling to take crunch carrots over looking Vantage Point. It so often is worth all the nagging and reminding and nudging to get to the next activity. And I look for ways to be less impatient, more trusting that we will get to where we need to go. There is just so much joy to be had when we emerge. Like today, the wind kept calling with Sister Sun: come out and dine with me!
And another breath came at the close of the day around the dinner table. Wildlife made it’s way before us again. Earlier in the month it was the fox. Tonight it was the blue heron just across the green near the stream out our window. What long and graceful wings! What a different way and mode of being. She brought along a peace, ushering in grace and forgiveness. She brought hope that the lions won’t be quite so…active tomorrow. She was a lovely gift to behold at the end of the 50th Earth Day.
As we live now into the surreal elements of pandemic, we are in deep touch with the fragility of life. We are reminded of the temporal nature of our systems, and the shortsighted reality of our policies.
After family tree art, morning lessons, serving snack, making oatmeal cookies, making double chocolate chip banana bread, serving lunch, cleaning classroom and playroom, setting up and having “High Tea” for my son’s Montessori Class Adventure, trail walking, dinner making, email checking, phone call with church member, church announcement sending, and worship readying…hmmm. Yeah, two baking projects are too many!
After hearing about the tornado activity down South, I reached out to my brother. They are okay, but I was sorry to hear that Easter Sunday brought such devastation to many in rural communities there–especially in the midst of the deep challenges of pandemic.
My daughter then insisted we take our map out to the golf course on our daily mandela walk in case we spied anything. At the mandela, we brought along some of Sunday’s palms to ward off monsters.
Our mandela has become our daily marker on our walking path. We’re always adding to it–today our purple balloon popped and it seems like a fitting addition to our stone pile after a tough morning in our home “classroom.” We Ring-Around-the-Rosied faster until we collapsed in breathless giggles. What a gift to stretch out on the field as the sun peaked out today knowing we’d be back to our little sacred spot as an ongoing stop for our stay at home.
Perhaps the extra space and time sped up this moment–providing us more chances to help her along. And she has reveled in it. And today feels like just that, a milestone. When we consider what has happened in this time, I’ll recall the excitment, our excitement as the training wheels came off and she was ready for the next rides of liberation. I smile now.
We stopped and made chalk stops all the ways to our mandela in the home states of our families. We couldn’t seem to chug home fast enough. We trudged back up the hill to the house windswept and out of breath.
In the first year of living in our house, I was living out the grief of leaving behind our old house, neighborhood, friends and church. While we sought to make this new nest comfortable, it felt at times like wearing a starchy shirt when you long for the folds and softness of the familiar. Isn’t how change can be?
