< ![CDATA[  I know where I am without ever opening my eyes. The sparrows and orioles and countless brown little birds are chirping their evening chorus. The smell of new mown grass, blended with duck marsh, with overtones of dairy farm, floats across the bay fields to meet me quietly at the end of a long day. Sounds and smells as much a part of the weave of my being as the colors splashed gaily across the flower beds I helped my mother to plant this week as we visited for her sixtieth birthday: flox, lupine, big purple balled alium, all standing proudly beneath the sumac in the center of the back slope. Her first clematis opened, frail and timid looking, as if peering out from behind the stick lattice my mothers hands braided together last summer to see if it really was warm enough to bloom. The poppies have fairly exploded in a riot of laughing red, spilling over the log that contains their bed on the south side of the house, beneath the arched eyebrow of the kindly lilac which oversees their growth: the dark purple lilac, not the one edged with white. That one grows on the other side of the house by the raised bed gardens which are already pregnant with summer produce, beginning to bulge with the promise of garlic and salads and red raspberries. Dad's faithful owls preside over the orderly rectangles with stoic vigilance, keeping the raiding birds at bay, birds not smart enough to know plastic painted owls from the real thing. I've trimmed the dead spots out of her lavender and put in dahlias and petunias and impatiens to fill in where her spring perennials will die back. Work that she did last year and hopes to do next year if her sore, swollen, post operative hands recover. She stood over me directing my hands, younger, stronger versions of her own as we faded together our reflection found in cold dark earth and eager young plants. My own eager young plants have rooted down deep and spent the week running the paths, bows meeting over their heads in verdant green tunnels, batting baseballs in a ferocious wind with their Gramps pitching and playing pioneers for long hours in the camper, which their imaginations have transformed into a covered wagon crossing the great plains of Canada. They've lashed their pirate flag to a long bamboo and disappeared into the canals in their white and blue rowboat with a most un-pirate-ish name: ‚ÄúSwan.‚Äù They row for hours, finding uninhabited islands, exploring otter runs, imagining grand battles with white sailed ships laden with gold which they sink in the marsh with imaginary cannons. Ezra, at four, is the only one who cannot row. They have appointed him the ‚Äúflag-cifer‚Äù like Pysen, the four year old flag officer in their most recent favorite book, The Peep Larsons Go Sailing. They imagine themselves in the fjords of Sweden alone at sea for a month, plugging the hole in their boat with putty and screwing on a cutting board over the patch. The Swan doesn't leak. Avid cyclists all, they've ridden the ten mile loop into the village to buy candy twice, bickering over who gets to ride on the back of Uncle Josh's bike and who ‚Äúhas‚Äù to ride on the back of Mom's. The Great Pan, Adventurer of Adventurers has swooped in from his Neverland of British Columbia to race his niece and nephews top speed down the driveway, roast marshmallows and fish. From the shine in their eyes, it is obvious that they are all bordering on the sin of idolatry, and loving it. He does nothing to disuade them as he regales them with stories of rowing the coast of Alaska from Anchorage to Vancouver, BC last summer and tales of the orca and sea lions and seals that swim around his island home on the other side of the continent. Ezra says he's going home with Uncle Josh. Uncle Josh says he'll take him. I say, ‚ÄúNo way, I've put in too much work on that kid up front... he's almost worth having. Get your own.‚Äù Even I must admit that he cuts a fabulous figure: muscle from head to toe, slightly leathery skin from living outside all of last year, sleeping in a hammock as he built his little float house, that calculated casualness that comes from living a quiet life at sea for the five years he spent circumnavigating, sparkly eyes and a little boy smile that cause the boys to run screaming and giggling from the room when he cocks his head and raises one eyebrow in their direction. What's not to love and worship? I spent this last, lilac scented, afternoon being rowed about the marsh by my four children. Hannah was the captain of the Swan on this particular voyage. Elisha was the head oarsman and Gabe, of course, was Smee. It was Ezra's particular charge to ‚Äúcare for the passengers.‚Äù Which meant me. They row surprisingly well. Ezra pointed out the little woven pouches of bird nests, carefully hung in the cattails and the carefully concealed holes in the bank where the otters have made their nests. We sipped shared sodas in their secret pirate cove and rowed just out to the edge of the bay which was declared, ‚Äútoo cold and windy,‚Äù for them to take Mother out upon. Yesterday they rowed Grammy clear across the bay and down the big canal on the other side, over a mile from home. As we approached the dock my tiny, fuzzy headed babies who've become master seamen docked with the grace of old salts while Ezra cupped his hand in front of his mouth, speaking into his mock microphone to ask the passenger to, ‚ÄúPlease keep your hands and feet inside the boat until it has come to a full stop at the dock and the crew has gotten out.‚Äù With great pride they helped their ‚Äúland-lubber‚Äù mother out of their Swan, oblivious to the fact that at eight she and their great Uncle Pan had had a boat of their own: Patita Mia (my little duck) which had been sailed up and down and all over canals and lakes and even oceans without the visible oversight of adults. I praised my capable sailors and left them to square away their ship as I ambled up to the house, past the four buttercups my father had quite intentionally not mowed down in the middle of the path, and further up the orange hawk-weed which had received the same deference.]]>