June will change her tune in restless walks

Out at 9 am to walk down the long hill via Linden Avenue. I'll miss going by this route on a regular basis.

I'm brought to a standstill by these. I don't know what they are; Demeter would. They are buzzing with bees and fluttering with butterflies - none of which hang around for a photograph.

Never mind, I know that they're there, and, perhaps foolishly, they give me hope for the planet.

Please don't tell me differently.

Making the slow turn

These photos were taken in Stanley Park in New Edinburgh two months apart -- not from the same exact angle, but they do give you some idea of the rather frighteningly dramatic change Hades makes, usually in a couple of weeks. On May 4th, winter had barely departed and the grass and trees dared to become green. It's as if summer comes in a rush, fearful that winter will come back.

Sometimes it does.

But now June is coming to an end. Securely summer. I sat with my family in Zak's Diner in the Byward Market yesterday, watching the crowds stream by: several generations of families in jeans and teeshirts, in to catch the Canada Day kerfuffle up on Parliament Hill this Monday; flocks of young women in bright mini-dresses and impossible heels, en route to the scores of wedding receptions in the city. Elder daughter told of an uncomfortable bus ride cornered by a school-mate from her elementary days, who loudly described her intentions of staying drunk until July 1st (having started on June 28th) and claimed I had dressed her down on the street for smoking. Elder daughter managed to remark that this sounded a bit out of character for me, but doubted this had much impact. Shaking our heads in bewilderment, we held up and swayed imaginary lighters while an old Aerosmith ditty played on the jukebox, startling our waitress. Younger daughter revelled in the thought of no more school until September and ate with more appetite than she has had for months.

I've never cared much for the first six months of the year, despite many happy things occurring during that time: the births of my daughters, meeting the Resident Fan Boy and marrying him two years later. However, June is ending and I can feel the ship that is the ongoing year making the slow pivot through summer to change direction in the autumn and steam back to Christmas. This is the part of the voyage I prefer.

(June 2013 has been my eleventh NaBloPoMo, a project that started with February 2009 and has continued two or three months a year. My twelfth NaBloPoMo will be December 2013, at which time I will have done all twelve months. There will be some posts between now and then -- just not every day. Thank goodness.)

The woman with the caterpillar eyes

It was probably almost exactly thirteen years ago on a slightly overcast Saturday during our last June in Victoria. The Resident Fan Boy was home for a weekend secondment, having gone ahead to begin his new permanent job in Hades. I remained behind, getting elder daughter through her final days of Grade Two, and frantically cleaning between viewings from prospective home-buyers during which I had to hustle younger daughter into a stroller and vacate the house. We hadn't seen the Resident Fan Boy for about a month and would not see him again for another five weeks when he would come back to escort us to our new province and city.

I was overtaxed; he was jet-lagged. That's probably why we thought taking the girls to the Oak Bay Tea Party with the accompanying midway at Willow Beach would be a good idea.

It wasn't so bad at first. The RFB took elder daughter on the rides. Younger daughter was too small to join her sister. Besides, for the past year she had developed a habit of melting down in anything involving crowds. I thought it had something to do with her father's frequent absences -- she had started having night terrors early on in his first secondment nearly two years before -- but I had made an appointment for later in the month to have her assessed by a speech pathologist.

I knew I had to get younger daughter to a washroom before setting off on the long bus-ride home, so I set up a rendezvous point with the RFB and elder daughter, and led younger daughter to the pavilion. I don't quite remember when she started screaming. Maybe it was the long line-up, maybe it was not knowing where her father and sister had gone, but by the time I got her into a cubicle, she was yelling blue murder. I tried to soothe her, but I knew there was a point when she was beyond my reach and I could only wait for her to subside. Somehow, we got through the business, and I beat a hasty and embarrassed retreat, aware of the many eyes on us and that the RFB and elder daughter must be wondering what on earth had become of us.

A woman stepped into our path.

"Why is she asking to be left alone?"

"Because she's had enough of here and she needs space," I replied wearily, scanning the crowd for an opening, but this woman was not budging. She was standing very close to me and what I chiefly remember about her was that she had blond hair (standard for Oak Bay) and dark-green eye-liner with one odd little hump on each side, like two little caterpillars.

"Well, I'm a mother and I'm concerned."

I couldn't believe my ears. "So am I!"

"I have three children and none of them ever behaved like this!"

"Well, good for you, lady," I called back, quickly steering younger daughter, who had calmed down quite a bit by this time, into an available gap in the milling bodies.

I wonder if Caterpillar Woman thinks back on this incident at all. If she does, it's no doubt with some self-satisfaction in confronting an evident child abuser. When I remember her -- and I try not to -- I think of her three children who never "behaved like this". I hope they saved all their acting-out for adolescence and made life a perfect hell for their perfect mother.