Isadora Duncan in a tree

It has been gorgeous here for the past few days, a sort of mini-spring that people warn me will soon end in a deluge of rain and mud.  They’re so serious in their warnings of impending watery doom that I feel as though I have missed an important ark memo.  Everyone else is busy building flotation devices to carry their families to safety, while I hang out in the backyard sunshine with a cup of coffee and a magazine.  I’m not worried — what were all those swimming lessons for if not to ensure the girls’ safety in times of flood?

In order to enjoy the back yard, however, I have to be very careful not to pay too much attention to what is actually going on around me.

Kallan has been spending a lot of her free time over the last few days climbing the fence at the back boundary of our yard.  It’s a big tall wooden fence, and if she were to fall, it would probably be very bad.  But she hasn’t fallen, and I am tired of yelling at her to stop doing all of the various and sundry incredibly good ideas she has that just might lead to injury.  So I have been biting my tongue as she scales the fence and then hangs over the top to yell into our rear neighbors’ yards.  If she falls into their yards, it’s their problem, right?

At first I didn’t understand what she was doing – the kids who live behind us are all boys, pretend-gun-toting boys with an impressive arsenal of weapons and big loud games of capture, escape, and death.  Kallan’s interaction with them up to this point has ranged from annoyance to complete disinterest.  So I watched as she yelled for the boys to come out and talk to her, and then watched her fling sticks and pebbles into their yards to get their attention.  I figured I must be missing something, so I asked Maj what the heck was up with her sister.

The answer, it turned out, was very simple.  “I’m pretty sure,” explained Maj, “that the two houses behind us both have pools in their back yards.”

And that knowledge has transformed these boys in Kallan’s mind from annoying loud aggressive boys with plastic weaponry and pools into merely . . . boys with pools.

Maj, who is always Maj, wasn’t interested, “If I don’t like someone outside of a pool, what’s going to change to make it so much fun to be in a pool with them?”

That’s my Maj.  My sensible girl.  Usually.

Unless she is climbing a smallish tree wearing a long silken scarf that gets tangled into her feet as she climbs, causing her scarf to slowly tighten on her neck, pulling her into a weird fetal position as she climbs.  I watched in disbelief as she slowly choked herself.  And then she fell out the tree, which was, as I said, a smallish tree, so the fall was actually more of a graceless three foot tumble into the unraked leaves below.

So that was a proud mommy moment.

And the girls have been working on their hole.  It’s a little bigger now, but their work has been slowed by the fact that they have chosen to dig the hole directly under the swing.  Whenever someone decides it’s a good time to dig, the other shovel-less girl decides it’s a good time to swing.  So the progress has been slow.

If understand correctly, their new plan is to dig the hole beneath the swing so deep that someone will be able to sit in the hole while someone else swings above them.  All I can imagine is one of the girls swinging over the deep empty hole, slipping off of the swing, and falling into the hole.  In my visions, the hole is about waist deep, so the girl (I’m betting it’s Maj), bent at the waist and carrying momentum, will then be cantilevered forward into the ground face first.

Which will be hilarious if an ambulance isn’t required.

I will keep you posted.

And there are always the slugs for backyard entertainment.  When we first moved here, the girls ran around the back yard, joyfully collecting all of the slugs they could find for their “slug farms.”  Have you ever seen a large coffee cup filled with slugs?  It was exactly like that.

Kallan and her friend were searching the back areas of our yard today for slugs.  As they pushed through the tangles of low-hanging branches and blackberry thorns, I asked them if they might be happier searching in the ivy, which contains many slugs, and is less prickery.  Nope, they said, they wanted to search where the “big-boy” slugs were.

Now I have said before that I try to do a good job of keeping our yard poo-free.  But I do not fight my way through the prickles and brambles to search for it.  Who would?

Turns out the slugs do.   And it turns out that nothing makes a slug happier (or fatter) than dog poo.  So Kallan and her friend were searching for piles of old poo among the prickles and brambles because that’s where the “big-boy” slugs go to dine.

I can hear it now:

“What did you do at Kallan’s today?”

“Searched for giant slugs in the dog poo.”

Great.

I never should have looked up from my magazine.