#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Excerpt

Wave interrupts me, breathlessly, in poetry workshop: We’re going for a bike ride. Do you want to come?

Yes, I want to come. And I am done. I join them on a bike. We ride a short way on the highway from our driveway and turn onto a wide, less busy street. It’s sunny today, the smoke is gone. We go to Millborn Farm which has become a new Trustees of Reservations property near us. We park our bikes and walk the expansive trails of this former farm with a view to a lake we’ve often paddled to on our kayaks. Through the fields we walk and I point out a wildflower to Wave. What’s a wildflower? he wants to know. I say, a wildflower plants itself where it wants to go. But he is suspicious of this. Doesn’t quite believe a flower can grow wild and suspects if there was a camera on this field, one might see a person planting the flower. I don’t argue with him. I just continue to point out the names of the flowers as we pass them, growing where they please. I tell him about how birds pass seeds too, not just wind. In their droppings. Right down from the sky. And then we come across a big boulder that he climbs and right away notices a few specks on top. Here’s some seeds dropped by a bird, he says. And I look, and he’s right. Later in the day we go to Farm Pond and swim to the far raft again with my daughter Franci who joins us. It’s sunny and cool, the water is cold. There are so many children to play with in the water and he is friendly and meets most of them.