picnic
On the way to the family picnic my son said Seconds remind me of wheat, minutes remind me of buckets, months remind me of hills, and years make me think about cars.
The picnic was at Island Lake in Poulsbo, down the road from the old farm, and the day was overcast. I am always surprised to see that my family is very nearly extinct; hardly anyone left, compared to childhood gatherings. I was the only cousin from my generation to show up, including the new married couple for whom the event was organized; they couldn't make it after all.
One of the great-aunts asked Where is your daughter? and I replied She turned thirteen! and everyone laughed and agreed they wouldn't see her for a few more years.
Somewhere in the middle of eating fried chicken and fixin's my mother whipped a copy of the Time article out of her purse and told the aunts they had to read it. I protested but they ignored me and I ducked my head, face practically in the potato salad as they read my interview comments.
People talked and laughed and I took my son over to the lake. We could see the sun reflecting in the water, the clouds obscuring the intensity so it looked like a full moon. We gathered pine cones and threw them out to test different theories about the ripples on the water.
When I walked back to the table one of my cousins said I've never met anyone who was interviewed for Time and I didn't know what to say.
After the picnic wound down we drove around looking at the town. I read recently that there is a Finnish cemetery in Scandia but I don't really believe it; my mother grew up there and she has no recollection of such a thing. Perhaps Briedablik or another district, but not the actual portion of the town she knew so well as a child.
We did find a cemetery near Island Lake but the names were mostly German and Norwegian. One grave claimed to be that of the first Norwegian settler. The sun came out and we decided to retire to the shade of a thrift store.
Before heading home we had a snack at Tony's, my favorite restaurant in the whole world, where I used to go for birthday pizza dinners. We sat in the addition with a view of the bay - Oyster Bay? and watched the sun cast pink and gold light across the boats below.
Leaving at sunset, we tried to catch the Bremerton ferry but it wasn't running for another two hours. We decided to get the 8:50 from Bainbridge Island, technically an impossible goal since there wasn't enough time to drive that far, but more entertaining than staring at the shipyard for two hours. We rushed across the peninsula and past the new casino and then got stuck in a caravan of other Volvo drivers desperately intent on making a ferry leaving imminently.
The sky was dark and the moon revealed: a huge nearly full moon that seemed to bob just above the road. The radio offered up a string of excellent 70's ballad rock and we sang along and pressed forward, laughing as the drivers in front of us kept tentatively swerving and then deciding not to pass each other.
Rushing to catch a ferry is a thrilling experience, one of the rare times in life when everything is either absolutely perfect or absolutely terrible and there isn't much to be done except stay on the road and hope for the best.
Posted by Bee at August 10, 2003 04:48 PM