Canada Day

I was up early this morning so enjoyed a beautiful sunrise from the sunroom while I waited to have my coffee (Actonel day). The sun was coming through the leaves of the trees so that it looked like a jungle scene and I thought “it’s going to be a beautiful day in the countryside”. After breakfast I got out there and cut the backyard, took a rest and cut some more. There was no dew on the lawn so you just know it’s going to be a warm day. Summer has finally arrived.

Remember when you were in elementary school and you just longed for the summer holidays? I remember having Field Day one of the last days of school when we got to do sports all afternoon out of doors. It was great fun. It must be like a best day for the teachers to see the kids having so much fun just being kids. I had a favourite tree at the very edge of the schoolyard which cut off the field from the school yard. I could climb right to the top and I would just hang there like a monkey. Of course, we weren’t allowed to do that in school hours, that was done on vacation time. There were also some apple trees along that line of trees and we’d hang on those as well and swing from branch to branch. I really don’t remember there ever being apples on them but I suppose there was eventually. There were even a couple of pear trees in our neighbourhood where I grew up though I think eventually they got cut down for new houses. Isn’t that sad?

When I was about eleven I discovered the creek on the other side of Applebyline (that’s how we would say it, fast like that) and we would have so much fun down there imaging every kind of game from cowboys and Indians to stagecoach to murder mystery. Sometimes we were Laura Ingalls on Plum Creek and sometimes we were Tarzan’s friends in the jungle. Other times we just went picking for raspberries or looking for frogs. Inevitably we would come home dirty and wet and my mother wondered where we found water. Naturally we never told her we had crossed the road and gone down to the creek. For the longest time I don’t think my mother even knew there was a creek though eventually she found out and we were forbidden to go. Didn’t stop us though. Water beckoned us like a haunted house calls to a Gothic heroine.

As I got a little older I can remember laying on the lawnchairs out in the garden and smelling my mother’s roses and the fresh cut grass as I read Anne of Green Gable or Jane Austen’s Emma during my summer break at University. Every once in a while I would dip into our swimming pool and do a lap or two and then crawl back out to the chair and just breath in the summer air.

You could say I love summer. All of it. Cutting grass, weeding, watching the birds, listening to the breeze. Life is good.

Happy Canada Day.