Perfect Day

I was just sitting here thinking about the perfect day.

The weather is absolutely perfect, sunny and warm with a light breeze that seems to blow at all of the right times. There is a big, beautiful, cloudless sky that can really only happen in Alberta. I suppose it could happen in other places, but there is no where else that I call home. We have had just the right amount of rainfall and the city is actually green in August. My garden is doing well in spite of me and even the front lawn is trying it’s best to look good.

We are having company and combined with having to clear out a few rooms for new flooring, the house is more organized and cleaner than it has been for many a year. Louise is on holidays and is right now returning from setting up a tepee down at the reservoir in anticipation of the World Outrigger Races which start this week. I walked the dog and he chose to do his business where I wasn’t entertainment for people driving by. Thanks Buster!

I am healthy and looking forward to a laid back day. Life is good.

There just isn’t that many perfect days in one’s life. Well, there may be but we get so caught up in the day to day living and the problems of getting through the day that we just miss them. Every now and then you do have all of the right circumstances that fit together perfectly for the perfect day. There are more perfect days when you are a kid than once you reach adulthood. Kids tend to have higher highs and lower lows than adults, so I would imagine that impacts somewhat.

I can remember one summer day with my cottage friends that was pretty near perfect. We were kicked out of the house early in the morning and threatened with having to do work if we returned before lunch. We went across the field to catch frogs in the swampy area of the lake. On the way across the field, we decided to lay traps for whoever might try to follow us. There was really no one else that might even remotely care how we spent our days, but that didn’t matter. We tied the grass at the top so that any would be pursuer would trip and …well…trip. By now our legs were soaked from the knees down due to the dew and big wads of what looked like spit which were the disgusting secretions of grasshoppers I think. When we reached the swamp, we each broke off a bulrush, pulling handfuls of the fluff off of the heads and tossing it at each other. We watched the pollywogs for a while, but I think the frogs were staying just out of sight. I suppose they had the odd run ins with little boys and preferred to keep their body parts on their bodies.

We ran back across the field playing tag and every now and then one of us would disappear into the long grass. It seems that someone had set traps to trip people. Devilishly clever! We came to the road and walked five abreast singing “One Eyed Purple People Eater” at the top of our lungs over and over again. I don’t think we liked the song that much, but it was probably one of the few songs that we all knew. We challenged each other to hit the glass insulators at the top of the power poles. Having no luck at that, we challenged each other to hit the power poles. Finally, the challenge was to throw a stone into the forest and see if you could hit a tree.

My uncle owned a lot of the land around the cottage and on that land was an old disused barn. I am thinking now that it was probably used because there was all sorts of hay bales and loose hay piled in it. You could climb up on the higher level and jump down to the loose hay. It was a mix of terror and joy, a real adrenaline rush. We weren’t allowed in the barn, so it was always a short but fun time.

We walked down the road again singing “Purple People Eater” again, what else. There was an old abandoned farm house that was haunted and of course that is just where we went next. It was dark and musty smelling inside, with old rotten furniture laying in pieces all over the floor. There was sheet music on the floor as well and every now and then you could read a title. “The Last March”, “Death and Destruction”, “Blood on The Ground” and honest to God it kept on and on like that. We were terrified! It was wonderful!

Eventually you can get bored with being terrified, but we found that if someone on the outside threw a rock against the wall, hundreds of bats would fly around and around inside the haunted house. I can’t begin to tell you how cool it was. We knew that we would be okay because bats have sonar and would avoid running into us. Just after Jeremy got a bat in the eye and Steve took one in the shoulder we ran out of the building and into the surrounding field, tripping of course on the clever traps in the grass.

What a great morning! Just perfect! I wonder what we can do after lunch.