A simple walk

Fiona, as I have mentioned, starts her days by asking where she gets to go and who she gets to see. Today was apparently a little short on excitement for her liking ... only a trip to the post office, a visit to the medical clinic and a quick stop to pick up a friend of Sophie's for a playdate at our house.

I spent the better part of the afternoon helping my mom with scheduling for our summer music program. When I got home, Fiona decided to practice before supper so that she would have the evening to "go somewhere" with me. As soon as I was down to my second-last forkfull of supper she was excitedly bouncing up and down and spelling "G-O! G-O!"

So we went. We drove down to town (I wanted to get some juice for Noah who is ailing on the couch with a wicked sore throat and a fever). We bought the juice and then parked by the creek and began following whichever of the myriad trails through the forest appealed to us.

I let her curiosity and delight carry us along. To Fiona everything was amazing tonight, from the colour of a boulder to the curve of a dead branch over the trail to the scent of fresh spruce needles. We got ever so close to the edge or the raging glacier-fed creek and marvelled over the way hills had shrunk to islands of stranded trees up to their knees in water. We touched lichens, we examined animal tracks, we smelled blossoms.

It's not that this is really new to her. It's that it's still exciting every spring to meet it all again as if for the first time, a year older, a year wiser, a year chattier and more thoughtfully observant.