Our Little Man.

 Our Little Man is growing up.  He has been rolling all around the floor for some time; now we are about to crawl & life will change forever.

I was asked over to help out for a few days ~ though in reality they have so many extra hands in the house I don't really think they need mine.  Mind you everyone else works ~ even ODD though she keeps extremely odd hours. The bonus is I do tend to be an early riser.  I can do early & I can do late; it's the inbetween daylight hours I have trouble staying awake, so I got the Little Man as the menfolk left for work.

I had never considered what sort of a grandmother I would be but I don't seem to be the doting sort. I do seem to be the *Let's get out of here* sort but that may be just because I find suburbia so dreadfully confining & it's awful to still wake early without the compensation of a splendid sunrise.

 So it was into the stroller for an early morning walk ~ not brisk.  I do not walk for exercise. I walk so I can gawk at other people's gardens [like the strange concoction of sand & grasses dotted with cut off poles & trailing mooring rope miles from the water ~ kudos for at least being original], & get my bearings in strange environments.

Like so much of our area this was once farmland ~ market gardens mostly but not now.  What farms there are  have horses.  Now it is broken into small allotments with boring modern houses. Lots of brick, a paltry excuse for vegetation & a great swath of green lawn to gobble up your water allowance in the dry.  House after house with not an original idea between them & yappy dogs throwing themselves at the fences as we passed. Ick.

But in amongst the red tiles & solar panels we found acres of green corridors that the MOTH had put in when he was in charge of Parks & Gardens & small playgrounds with a swing or two, verdant spaces of wild that the Little Man & I can explore together when he gets bigger because I don't think I'm a neat & clean & everything in it's place grandmother either. Let's face it, I wasn't that sort of a mother.  

My mother tells this story of my first holiday away from home.  When we returned I marched around the house declaring: My bed! My chair! My table! I still dislike the sense of dislocation that comes from being in a strange environment. Where do they keep the bread? The sugar?  The COFFEE!!! How does the gas work? Whose bathroom can I use? Is it rude to nap because I don't sleep well at night with all the cars & trucks hooting down the highway, the trains, & the street lights seeping through the shutters?  I miss my dopey cats & the cry of curlews under the moon, the plop of fish & the strong tang of salt in the air. 

 And I have this terrible aversion to conservative suburbia, so neat & tidy & conforming.  It always makes me think of My Brother Jack [George Johnstone] ~most of which I don't remember having read it only once a terribly long time ago, but there is one unforgettable segment.  Davey Meredith, drowning in urban ennui, plants a blue gum out the front of his place knowing perfectly well it is big, fast growing & destructive.  It is his way of thumbing his nose at his neighbours as that tree pushes up the cement footpath, invades the drains, drops limbs on roofs & leaves in pools until ultimately council forcibly cuts it down. I understand what drove him to plant that tree.

To say nothing of the fact I leave my computer behind & plowed through a rather strange book: Lake of Sorrows, which ODD picked up for sixpence at the thrift shop one year expressly for me & which I had never read. Now I have.  I wonder why?