So, June is when every single weekend is peppered with bridal showers, baby showers and graduation open houses, depending on your age, could be all three. In a family as enormous as ours, we get invites to two or three graduation parties each weekend and that doesn't even include friends' kids; just relatives.
After Molly's party last Saturday and my night with BoopityBoop, I was looking forward to a nice, quiet week and that's what I got. I love my routine; I spent 40 years making that groove fit me perfectly and I love it when I can just coast along, getting stuff done. The weather was good: it didn't rain all day, even on the days that it rained. Our lawn is looking lush and the new plantings are coming along beautifully.
Jay and I have walked the lake nearly every day this week, which is always fun and very good for us. We've seen lots of goslings and turtles but so far only one family of ducklings and they're hiding in a swampy, woodsy corner of the lake. We usually see a lot more ducklings by now. I wonder if the high number of big snapping turtles in the lake has anything to do with the dearth of ducklings? Nature's a cruel, heartless bitch.
This Saturday we had a graduation party for our nephew Vince, my brother Joe's sixth child and last to graduate from high school. He and a buddy had a joint party at the buddy's house in a very high scale neighborhood North of St. Paul. How high scale?
The party for Molly was in a gorgeous neighborhood in Edina, which is a very wealthy first ring suburb of Minneapolis. The place where Vince's party was made Edina look like a run down slum.
Seriously.
First off, as lately as last Autumn, there was a guard house one had to pass just to enter the enclave. We were up there for a friend's birthday party and had to state our bidness just to get directions to the party. No gawkers allowed!
The streets are narrow, winding, perfectly paved and forested. The houses were all big enough to pass for the club houses of country clubs, far more beautiful than anything you'll see on Lottery Dream House and the lawns (I'm guessing an acre or two each)all looked like they employ enormous teams of specialty greens keepers, gardeners and landscape architects to keep them in condition. I hope they do, those folks all need jobs, just like the rest of us.
Lots of beautiful ponds, woods and marshlands for everyone's visual delight, as well.
I felt like I was on the set of a movie.
A really good movie!
The party was great: the food was supplied by a burger truck and there was both a bar, up on the deck near the house and coolers full of pop and bottled water down on the lawn near all the tables, which were decorated with the school's colors. Despite the dozen or so large tables, the lawn was still large enough for several games of bocce ball, basketball, football and a few other lawn games to be played yet nothing felt or was the least bit crowded.
I think half the people there were my relatives. It's always fun to see everyone. Katie was there with BoopityBoop. This magical neighborhood is really not far from where she lives at all, yet it may as well be in Narnia...
Maybe it is Narnia!!
We all had a great time and when it was time to go, we helped Katie get the girls back to their car. She said, as we walked down the ridiculously beautiful road "I never thought I'd want to live in a neighborhood like this but I do. I want to live here."
"I want you to live here, too!" I said.
Jay and I had spent the morning going to garage sales in our neighborhood, which is also pretty nice but a completely different standard of nice from Narnia.
We scored a mixology set, a tin lobster for the deck, an exercise step and seven tubes of oil paint. We spent a grand total of $18.00. That's a good haul! Then we walked the lake before heading up to Vince's party.
We got home in plenty of time for Jay to break out his new mixology set and whip up a bucket of Manhattans for us to enjoy on our front hill, watching the sun go down. Just as we finished our drinks, Andy and Vi pulled up the drive. They'd come to admire our yard and see all the new plants.
Two hours and two bottle of wine later, they had to go pick Charlie up from his friend's house.
All in all, a terrific ending to a splendid week.