Our daughter and her daughter are driving forty minutes to spend the morning with us. They almost-just woke up; they will skip breakfast and stop at Kneaders.
I insist they come to our house for breakfast. I list: waffles, yogurt, fruit, oatmeal you name it we have it. She chooses waffles, but warns us--when we get to your house, we'll be hungry. Her little girl will drink her milk on the way down, but when they reach our house there may not be much time before they are hangry.
The message is clear.
When she calls, she is already on the road. I watch her location and follow her down the freeway. When they hit the point of the mountain, they are only twenty minutes away. I start the waffle batter. Defrost blueberries. The waffle iron is poised on the counter ready for plug in.
When she's at State Street, we cook the first waffle. She pulls into the driveway when the second waffle is about to come off the iron.
How appreciative they both are! The little one exclaims, "Yummy!"
After breakfast, we head outside to see the giant crane begin to take down one of the giant cottonwoods in our neighbor's backyard. The air is warm, the sky is blanketed in gray. The toddler rests in the stroller. We watch. We are enchanted by the two men hanging in the sky, pinned to one of the limbs of the giant cottonwoods. The whir of saws rumbles through the air.
It's so beautiful that we go to the garden to pick tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes are abundant. They are sweet and tart and land in the mouth like a gumball. The two year old climbs through the caged- tomato jungles looking up at me and asking, "Ripe?"
With a full bowl, my daughter recognizes the carrot patch. We start to dig. I grab a shovel. I watch as mother and daughter wiggle the carrots out of the ground.
A discovery! A patch of mushrooms growing in the compost pile next to the carrot patch. Our little one ventures in with a warning not to put mushrooms in her mouth. She picks each miniature mushroom as I explain the parts. "This is the cap. These are the gills."
She turns the tiny mushroom, "Cap." She turns it over. "Gills." She continues picking, smashing, and pauses to smell the earthy scent when I ask her what they smell like.
"Turkeys!" My daughter has spotted a rafter of turkeys roaming on the hillside beyond the fence. She expects us to jump up and follow the fascinating bird, but the little one barely glances before jumping back into the mushroom bed. She has no context for turkeys. We hear their wings flap as they try to fly over the neighbor's fence. My daughter's curiosity persists and we march off in pursuit of the turkeys. We see the last one fly off--but no matter--we are nearing nap time, so we pick up our bowl of tomatoes and carrots and make our way back to the house where we wash our hands and our fresh picked carrots.
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