Boys, birds and wildflowers

This has been a glorious weekend.

I went to visit my grandsons in Cambridge. It takes a couple hours to get there, depending on the traffic, and this time I went across the QEW and up highway 6 to Safari Road.

Going west on Safari Road, first I thought I spied some May Apples, which I haven’t seen since I was a child living in the country with plenty of time to roam through the woods and just look to see what was there. Then I DID see a Snow goose. It flew very low across the road right in front of me. I’ve never seen one of those before and didn’t even know what it was until I looked it up. What a beautiful creature!

Just after I arrived at the boys’ house, I was sitting on the side porch and heard the youngest grandson coming up the walk with his friend in front of him. His friend stopped when he saw me on the porch (we hadn’t met before) and I heard my grandson say to his friend - as he passed my car - “Granny’s here! She’s really nice.” What a great treat to hear an endorsement like that when it wasn’t necessitated by duty.

The best part of the weekend was seeing my oldest grandson’s latest spelling test. He got 28/30, and it was handwritten beautifully - this from a child that his previous school had forecast would never learn to read well or write at all, despite his well above average intelligence. They said he’d have to use a keyboard forever for writing and have an aide to read things to him.

He’s been in a new program for a couple years now. It falls under the PHAST banner and I think is called Empower Reading. It has done absolute miracles for him and he’s pretty much functioning as he should now. He’ll stay in that school for one more year to solidify his gains and then he’ll be off and running. It is *so* wonderful to see him being what he was meant to be.

Coming home along Safari Road again, I kept my eyes open to see what wildflowers I might see. It was wonderful! Dogtoothed violets, trilliums, May apples and a couple other things I couldn’t immediately identify, since it was raining really hard - much too hard to get out of the car and look. And if I slowed down too long another car would surely come along. It was such a nostalgic experience - I know where I’ll be with my camera next May. Makes me want to pull a Thoreau and move to a cabin in the forest.

Unfortunately, there’s this thing called snow-shovelling that also has to be done, and I’m not up for a real lot of that anymore.

I got home and the English wild violets were blooming under the big maple in the backyard, and the buds on the lilac are fat enough to burst open soon. This will be the first year I get a lot of blooms on the lilac as usually the maple blooms first and shades it too much. I’m going to have to move it.

I’m so content and happy I just keep sighing and smiling . . . life should always be this good.