I'm really wanting just the HAVING of a REAL Lawn Tea---I've planned bits and pieces and cloths and platters and menus and flowers for three Summers now, and just never seemed to get it together.
But some days, late in the afternoon, when the air's like water on your skin, and the sun has that only-in-late-day golden slant on the green lawn, and the huge hostas are the shade of the ocean depths, I think how much I wish I'd been working on it, and had everything ready, and the guests were soon to arrive---I think, "Oh, I wish it were TODAY."
I SO much want to have one soon, and perhaps on our Anniversary, or even better---Sweetpea's birthday, now that she's learning the refinements of tea parties and how ladies behave. She's always had good manners---it's just the stubborn that we're working on.
We had a few REAL life lessons yesterday, on minding and not saying no, and it had gotten past a baby thing, into the area of safety. So after a good warning Monday about what would happen, yesterday she had to choose a toy and put it in the garbage. I’d explained that it would go on the big truck and she’d never see it again.
She took a long time, and I didn't see her approach, and then, like some kinda whale-spouted altar-girl in a skort, she held up both cupped palms, offering up Fuzzy-Pup's ONE toy---his ratty, dog-eared-in-every-sense little pink stuffed MOLE which used to have the cutest tiny black felt flaps for his little foot-diggers.
Smart, I knew about, but that level of calculation bespeaks a career in con games or politics, or both.
She finally returned to the kitchen with her small pink piggy-bank (the one with the bottom plug missing, so the coins fall right through) and consigned it to the eggshells and coffee-grounds. Then she inquired wistfully, “When will the truck be here?”
She re-visited the trash several times during the course of the afternoon, gazing into the depths and sighing deeply, and a couple of times I heard her whispering to herself, "And I'll never see it again."
