I’m standing in a crush of commuters crowding the ferry dock, searching for our youngest daughter in the steady stream of bobbleheads disembarking the 4:35 p.m. from Vashon. I spot her in a gaggle of grade-school kids skipping down the concrete-and-steel apron, and as they frolic past, I reach for her hand. We embrace awkwardly in the swirling tide of impatient commuters
We have two girls involved in scouts. Our youngest daughter is a real green-sashed Girl Scout. Her older sister attends an alternative girl scout-type thingy on Saturday afternoons. The Girl Scouts have better cookies.
We bought the lemonade stand at a garage sale last summer, 10 bucks. On a heat-wave-hot Saturday afternoon in August, we followed hand-lettered signs on hot-pink paper advertising a huge moving sale. We saw the lemonade stand at anchor in a sea of green salal, moored under a tall evergreen tree.
I don’t have a good feeling about these gingerbread houses.
At parent-teacher conferences last week, both of our twins’ teachers mentioned that there are a lot of new families on Vashon this year. In each class, they’ve got four or five new kids. Parents looking for a safe place to raise their children might be drawn to Vashon for the same reasons we’re here — good schools, strong community. And it helps if you like to ride boats.
I’m sitting on a wobbly green plastic resin chair, on the front lawn, in the dark. Across the harbor, pale-yellow lights of a distant cabin echo on black water, undulating pillars of light, a dozen stilled comets.
My face is reflected in the deckhand’s mirrored sunglasses as he motions for me to start my car, a stony expression chiseled in his weathered face. I slip the minivan into gear, my dress shirt sticky with sweat. On the dock, in the full glare of early-evening sun, I pass a pair of chortling dusty-diesel busses crowded with a disorderly crush of sweltering commuters.
A laugh track bleats from a TV down the hall while five-fingered maple leaves wave listlessly in mid-July afternoon heat. Our children are bundled up in the cool shade of the TV room, watching an insipid teen comedy while I’m seated at a computer, working from home after a week’s vacation.
With a buzz, whoosh and perfunctory clunk, a pink printed-paper ticket slips between two black-rubber rollers like a rakish pink tongue. I point the minivan into the cool darkness of the garage, following the traffic arrows and admonishments that roll by like a litany of bossy Burma-shave signs. Nosing into an empty slot, the van erupts into a writhing pig-pile of kids elbowing each other for advantage: the first-one-out-the-door contest.
The grass in our front yard is 2 feet high, an undulating sea of leprechaun-green straw swaying in a taciturn breeze. My two young sons and I are seated around the breakfast table on a Saturday morning in early May, wiping up streaks of maple syrup on our plates with the last shards of salty bacon
The blunted rays of flannel-gray February daylight melt into the mirror-still harbor, unbroken sky-gray and harbor-gray split by a jagged band of misty black firs and skeleton maples on the far shore.
Because they’re frequently mentioned in this monthly column, our youngest kids recently argued with each other about which of them is more famous
I need to cancel my column this week. Our family has been really busy with basketball, ballet, a bout of some sort of barfing flu, and the grass is growing again.
