On Weeding

Mary and I headed out for an early morning walk before she and Leo took the kids to a church picnic for Labour Day. Pulled pork had been cooking in her slow cooker all night for the event, so the smell was delicious. The kids were wearing swimming suits, for a plastic water slide is being set up on the hill beside the church. Mary reminded me that her best memories of church are parties where the kids would run around all they liked. Leo was packing towels. They were picking up another couple of kids on the way to the party, and going a little further to pick up and drop off another family when their first load to the church was complete. How is that for shades of the past?

I stayed home – and did some weeding. “Who loves the gardening? You or Leo?”, I asked Mary on the early morning walk.

I must have been trying to change the subject from who to vote for in tomorrow’s election which subject had taken most of the talking time on the walk. “The Liberals are corrupt, the new party has no experience in politics, the Patti Quebecois are still wanting to succeed. Where is the choice for a reasoned voter?” she opined.

But back to the gardening, I reminded her. “Oh, I think I am the one who loves the gardening,” she said.  So it is just like me to stay home from the picnic and do the job Mary wishes she were doing. I was puzzled when I pulled back some irises at the front door and saw a small wet frog nestled on the pole that supports the porch overhang. In anyone else’s house I would have thought that frog was real, but at this house there is almost a 100% chance that the frog is an acrylic garden ornament. To back me up in that assertion, there is a poster of a frog on the deep freeze downstairs, images of frogs on bath towels, on t-shirts and on stemware, frog fridge magnets, wooden frogs that go ribit when a stick is drawn down their backs and real frogs in cages.  In any case, I went to get my camera, but by the time I was back the frog was gone.

I should have gone with my first impulse to capture it for the snake to eat and then, at least, I would have been able to get a picture and taunt the kids a bit before I let it go.