I open the holiday trailer door and am instantly greeted by beauty.
Shards of soft golden sun pierce the green of morning and on a makeshift stove, coffee is perking. I pause a moment to remember the last time I saw or heard coffee perking and I can’t. It doesn’t matter.
I smell the freshly perked coffee and squint my eyes and it’s enough.
I’m happy! I love camping and the trees and the sun and the smell of the freshly perked coffee.
And I love all of my grandchildren, even though they eyed me with suspicion when later that morning I suggested we play scrub.
The suspicion was fuelled by a generation gap wider than the Grand Canyon and kept alive by a new language spoken by these mysterious devices the kids carry with them always. I’m convinced they carry those things so they don’t have to carry on real, live conversations with people like grandmas.
I knew all that, but I also knew I had a mini baseball team within my grasp.
“Scrub? Grandma, do you even know what you are talking about?”
I ignored them.
“Let’s go,” I said in my grandma knows best voice.
They reluctantly followed me out to a clearing that I saw at once had potential as a ball diamond. I grabbed the Frisbee. “This,” I said sternly, is no longer a Frisbee. This is home plate. And that tree over there. That is first base.”
I tried to explain how the game worked. “Everyone runs up and touches home plate and you yell out what position you are,” I said. “Batter, pitcher ….whatever!”
They looked at me, baffled and I think, a little afraid. What was their crazy grandma up to now?
And that tree …. definitely that tree did not look like a first base.
Finally, I grabbed the yellow plastic bat and stood by the Frisbee and said, “Really guys, it doesn’t matter. Just hit the ball. We’ll figure it out as we go along.”
And as the sun illuminated the forest behind us with this kind of golden halo and their mom washed dishes on the picnic table in the distance, I was happy because I heard what I wanted to hear. It was the point of the whole game, really.
I heard them laugh. Excited, childish laughter. Gleeful laughter.
And I hear them yell!
“You are out. I got you. Run, Jackson run!”
OK, actually that was me!
The game is over now and I am back at work and the kids are back with their parents and, no doubt, talking a lot of that social media type language that I don’t really get.
Ooh well. For a brief moment, I got to go back to a time when a tree became first base, and a Frisbee or a board or a scrap of cardboard was home plate.
And, I hope when they become adults and it seems necessary for seriousness to take precedence over laughter, they will remember a day when the sun slanted through the trees just so and their grandma reminded them that imagination is the best gift ever, followed, of course, by laughter.
And I hope they smile. Maybe even chuckle.
— On the Other Side