The time of this has been imminent but shifting for the last six months as Mr. Duchess worked out his military path, but the time has finally come and Duchess moved out of state yesterday. They won't get housing until he is further in his training so her stuff is all still here, but she can stay with some of his extended family and see him on weekends. So. It was time.
We decided last Sunday to gather everyone up and do a picnic in the park. We hadn't all been together since Christmas, as Dame is still living in Seattle with Bookworm awaiting the completed addition. And we hadn't done a picnic in the park since . . . I'm afraid it might have been pre-Covid. I took the kids on some local hikes during Covid but DOB was not doing well enough to venture out, and then when he was better everyone was bigger and busier and everything had changed. But when they were little it was something we did pretty much every week the weather was remotely tolerable.
It made the most sense to meet up with Dame and go to a park in Seattle and it proved to be the sort of glorious spring day that occurs much more in fiction than in actuality. We had been to the Asian Art Museum last month and I thought it might be fun to visit the park around it, especially since there was an old water tower you could climb for a view of the city. When I saw how nice the day was I was worried it would be too crowded, but it was just pleasantly populated.
However, by the time we arrived, DOB was in desperate need of finding the restrooms and parked near one, while Deux and Dame immediately hopped out of the car and made a beeline for the tower at the other end of the park. Dash and Duchess and I unloaded the folding chairs and lunch and then were trying to catch up, while DOB followed along in a faint hope that there would be a restroom at both ends of the park and he could watch the stuff while we climbed the tower.
There was not a restroom at the other end of the park, nor was even the approach to the tower accessible, so DOB wheeled back to the other one by the car while the rest of us trailed the first two to the top of the tower, Dash and I ladened with three folding chairs and a cooler bag full of lunch. After we had briefly caught our breath and admired the view at the top of the tower, we all went pell-mell back down again, back across the park to the car only to encounter no sign of DOB along the way.
At this point we had had about enough of walking about with everything and so we decided to just sit down where we were (there was plenty of nice grass handy) and hope DOB turned up. Dash went off to look for him but apparently they both just spent some time wandering separately on some of the trails and enjoying the view. Eventually everyone and the food all made it to the same location and we had lunch and a resounding game of 6-person Spades (scoring invented on the spot) and the sort of conversation that would horrify people if it were made into cute little cards to stimulate conversation but the more printable of which was, "If you swallowed sunglasses whole, would you be able to digest them?" (Which was itself a spin-off of, "If I swallowed your sunglasses, would they still be in the car?")
Like every perfect moment it was over far too quickly and it is a thing that will almost certainly never occur again, but also, to steal a bit from Winnie the Pooh, in an enchanted place on the top of the Forest, four little ducklings will always be playing.
