picnics

This noon anyone who wants to can go to the John Wayne Marina in Sequim. It is a Complimentasry Picnic which I guess means that our kitchen is supplying all the food for us. I am anxious to go for I love pinics and I love the John Wayne Marina. There is a wonderful restaurant there and I know I will probably wish we were eating there instead.

The above made me think of all the picnics I remember from the time before my father was 'Lost at sea'. A little North of us, on the beach lived people we were not even rrelated to, but felt about them like aunts and uncles and cousins. He owned a plumbing supply company in the city, and they did not move out permanently until he retired. But summers and vacations they were there and the place was jumping. Their children were much older than we were. As a matter of fact, they did their romancing and later some of their weddings were held at their house. They always had music at their parties and my sister and I learned how to dance, because the young swains would invite us to dance.

Tant Elin was the most fun grown up person I have ever met. She could have been a clown. She was the dress designer at the Theatre in Helsingborg. When they moved out to the beach permanently, she was always looking for something fun to do, and most often she would include us in her merrymaking. We had a yearly custom of having children going around the village singing songs and sticking a branch of a birch tree with tender new green leaves in the window. It was sort of like Halloween here. We would either get eggs or money. It was a fun time for we were professing that Spring was coming. My mother had never let us 'sing May'. She thought it was just begging. Tant Elin said Pooh. let them go. I will dress them all up in some of my finery.

Her finery was unbelievable. I was a princess in fabulous clothes and a tiara that to my eyes looked exactly like DIAMONDS. My brother was a sailor of some sort. We had a friend who played the accordion and all of us looked like a millon dollar. There were five or six of us. We began each holding a little basket but soon found we had to go home to get a bushel basket for we got so many eggs. And a lot of money too. It's an old old custom, to wish everyone happiness in the new season.

Each one of us would sell the eggs to our mothers or, as we did, our family had many too many eggs, we gave or sold them to neighbors and friends. We made a lot of money and felt we were rich.

One year when I was between one and two, at one of our Sunday picnics I toddled away from adult supervision and fell into something that must have worked as a sump-pump and one of the young boy friends found me, gasping. I was too young to remember it and for some reason I never asked anyone what happened. It sounded so awful, I would rather not hear about it.