Backyard Wedding Quotes

You can have anything you want. A big church wedding. A backyard barbecue. A five-figure wedding dress. But I have one demand.” Of course it was a demand and not a request. “What’s that?” “I want daisies in your hair.

Black holes aren't an Earth Science topic, but Mr. Zerbiak is like that. One minute Adam Bell was asking a question about a meteoroid he found in his backyard, and the next Mr. Zerbiak was saying that he was "going a little off topic here, but..." and of course everyone was suddnely all interested. If teachers pretended that everything they said was "off topic", we'd have a whole school full of straight-A students.

But we’d have each other. And that’s enough for me.” She was crying now, the tears streaking down her face and carrying her mascara with them. I put my arms around her and wiped her cheek with my thumb. “I love you so much, sweetheart. So, so much. And it’s in part because of things like that. You’re an idealist and a romantic, and you have a beautiful soul. And I wish the world was ready to be the way you see it. I wish that the rest of the people on earth with us were capable of living up to your expectations. But they aren’t. The world is ugly, and no one wants to give anyone the benefit of the doubt about anything. When we lose our work and our reputations, when we lose our friends and, eventually, what money we have, we will be destitute. I’ve lived that life before. And I cannot let it happen to you. I will do whatever I can to prevent you from living that way. Do you hear me? I love you too much to let you live only for me.” She heaved into my body, her tears growing inside her. For a moment, I thought she might flood the backyard. “I love you,” she said. “I love you, too,” I whispered into her ear. “I love you more than anything else in the entire world.” “It’s not wrong,” Celia said. “It shouldn’t be wrong, to love you. How can it be wrong?” “It’s not wrong, sweetheart. It’s not,” I said. “They’re wrong.

Anyway...I'm a firm believe that every girl should get one Barbie dream wedding in her lifetime, but if that marriage craps out, I'm also a firm believer that all future weddings must be banned to beaches and back yards.

My little brother's greatest fear was that the one person who meant so much to him would go away. He loved Lindsey and Grandma Lynn and Samuel and Hal, but my father kept him stepping lightly, son gingerly monitoring father every morning and every evening as if, without such vigilance, he would lose him. We stood- the dead child and the living- on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forver. To please us both was an impossibility. ... 'Please don't let Daddy die, Susie,' he whispered. 'I need him.' When I left my brother, I walked out past the gazebo and under the lights hanging down like berries, and I saw the brick paths branching out as I advanced. I walked until the bricks turned to flat stones and then to small, sharp rocks and then to nothing but churned earth for miles adn miles around me. I stood there. I had been in heaven long enough to know that something would be revealed. And as the light began to fade and the sky to turn a dark, sweet blue as it had on the night of my death, I saw something walking into view, so far away I could not at first make out if it was man or woman, child or adult. But as moonlight reached this figure I could make out a man and, frightened now, my breathing shallow, I raced just far enough to see. Was it my father? Was it what I had wanted all this time so deperately? 'Susie,' the man said as I approached and then stopped a few feet from where he stood. He raised his arms up toward me. 'Remember?' he said. I found myself small again, age six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet. 'Granddaddy,' I said. And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and in a living room in Illinois. Now, as I had done then, I placed my feet on top of his feet. 'Granddaddy,' I said. And because we were all alone and both in heaven, I was light enough to move as I had moved when I was six and he was fifty-six and my father had taken us to visit. We danced so slowly to a song that on Earth had always made my grandfather cry. 'Do you remember?' he asked. 'Barber!' 'Adagio for Strings,' he said. But as we danced and spun- none of the herky-jerky awkwardness of Earth- what I remembered was how I'd found him crying to this music and asked him why. 'Sometimes you cry,' Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.' He had held me against him then, just briefly, and then I had run outside to play again with Lindsey in what seemed like my grandfather's huge backyard. We didn't speak any more that night, but we danced for hours in that timeless blue light. I knew as we danced that something was happening on Earth and in heaven. A shifting. The sort of slow-to-sudden movement that we'd read about in science class one year. Seismic, impossible, a rending and tearing of time and space. I pressed myself into my grandfather's chest and smelled the old-man smell of him, the mothball version of my own father, the blood on Earth, the sky in heaven. The kumquat, skunk, grade-A tobacco. When the music stopped, it cold have been forever since we'd begun. My grandfateher took a step back, and the light grew yellow at his back. 'I'm going,' he said. 'Where?' I asked. 'Don't worry, sweetheart. You're so close.' He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity.

I think of our backyard pond growing up. Of the goldfish we'd bring home, bobbing in plastic bags on the surface of the water. My dad explained they needed time to adjust to the temperature of the pond before being released. If such a small creature required such care, imagine the complex process a victim must word through in order to integrate back into daily life. There is no right way, there is only listening to what is good and comfortable for your body. Maybe now you are terrified, bobbing inside the clear plastic container around you, thinking, I am trapped, this is not how it's supposed to be. Just remember: the temperature is slowly changing, you are adjusting. You will make it into that pond. With a little more time, you'll be free.

This probably would have been my exact worst nightmare of bringing a boy home to meet my parents, if I’d ever had enough creativity to imagine my father throwing a live bobcat on the boy I was trying to impress. I assumed that Daddy had accidentally left a bobcat in the house, fallen asleep, realized his terrible mistake when he woke up and heard Victor’s voice, and was now surreptitiously sneaking it out the back door so that Victor would never suspect that we were the type of family to keep live bobcats in the house. Unfortunately, that was not my father’s intent at all, and my eyes widened in horror as my father leaned over and yelled in his booming, cheerful voice, “HELLOOOO, VICTOR,” while tossing a live bobcat on him. Most people reading this will assume that this was my father’s way of making would-be suitors terrified of him so they would always treat his daughters right, but this wasn’t even vaguely a concern of his. He would just as happily have tossed the live bobcat on my mother or me, if it weren’t for the fact that we’d all become superhumanly aware of the terrifying sounds of my father trying to be quiet. In my father’s defense, it was a smallish sort of bobcat that my dad was nursing back to health so he could release it back into the wild, rather than one of the full-grown ones from the backyard. At the time, my dad had several large bobcats he was keeping, but they were seldom indoors, and if my mom found one in the house she’d shoo it into the bobcat cages outside with a broom. I

These were my people; cells in my best image; my negation and deletion. In seeing them, I named them, and they began to spurt. She leaned with her whole life to kiss me. I was awake again and so was Darrel, the most awake we’d ever been. I walked through the kitchen over the piles of sleeping or prone pleased bodies to pretend I could see out through the mirror over the window to the flat backyard.

The space center's proximity to my backyard came to signify an intersection between heaven and hell. Florida was somewhere between the two; it was America's phantom limb, a place where spaceships were catapulted out into the cosmos. Alligators emerged from brackish water. Vultures and hawks circled above. Mosquitoes patrolled the atmosphere at eye level. We shared an ocean with sharks and dolphins. There were no seasons, only variations of humidity. Time slithered, festering in a damp wake of recollections. I believed in the Bermuda Triangle. I thought it would move in over Florida one night. By dusk an unknown force would vaporize us through a tear in the atmosphere. We'd be stuck, wandering in a parallel version of the same place, unaware that we were dead but dreaming. People came here to vanish.

I gazed at Nina and Theodore standing now before the window about to say their vows, or as Nina had phrased it, whatever words their hearts gave them at the moment, and I thought it just as well Mother was not here. She would’ve expected Nina to be in ivory lace, perhaps blue linen, carrying roses or lilies, but Nina had dismissed all of that as unoriginal and embarked on a wedding designed to shock the masses. She was wearing a brown dress made from free-labor cotton with a broad white sash and white gloves, and she’d matched up Theodore in a brown coat, a white vest, and beige pantaloons. She clutched a handful of white rhododendrons cut fresh from the backyard, and I noticed she’d tucked a sprig in the button hole of Theodore’s coat. Mother wouldn’t have made it past the brown dress, much less the opening prayer, which had been delivered by a Negro minister.

A barbeque in Jasper County does not mean hamburgers and chicken breasts on a fancy gas grill. Yankees call anything you cook outside "barbeque." The word 'barbeque' in Ray's neck of the woods is a 'noun,' not a verb, and it means a whole hog tied to a spit with chicken wire and rope and roasted in an outdoor oven, usually in someone's backyard or some parking lot. And the fixin's that must accompany it are baked beans, collard greens, white rolls, cole slaw, and rice topped with a sweet gravy made from the drippings and other unmentionables that the packs call hash. Jasper folks sort of take the "don't ask, don't tell" approach with the hash. 'We don't want to know what's in it,' Ray thinks, 'but it sure tastes good.

Jesus contrasts who blesses and curses. The sheep are blessed “by my Father.” We might assume, then, that the goats are inversely cursed by the Father; but no such thing is said. Jesus simply says they are cursed. Like the rich man clutching his greed in the rubble of his riches while heaven calls him “son.” Like the wedding crasher refusing wedding clothes while the King calls him “friend.” Like the older brother weeping and gnashing his teeth in the backyard while the Father invites him inside to join the prodigal’s party. God blesses; we curse. The Father is good; we want to be left alone. The Light shines brightly; we prefer darkness. Ultimately, we are judged not for our failure to successfully wrap our hands around God’s arm, but rather for our stubborn refusal to be grasped by him, our incessant prying of his fingers from our recalcitrant hearts. God redeems his world; our destructive power is cast outside. God’s kingdom is established; the wildfire is banished. God brings an end to the bondage of creation.

I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.

I fumbled in my pockets for my father’s map. I stared and rubbed the paper between my fingers. I read the sightings’ dot’s dates with my wormed eyes, connecting them in order. There was the first point where my father felt sure he’d seen mother digging in the neighbor’s yard across the street. And the second, in the field of power wires where Dad swore he saw her running at full speed. I connected dots until the first fifteen together formed a nostril. Dots 16 through 34 became an eye. Together the whole map made a perfect picture of my mother’s missing head. If I stared into the face, then, and focused on one clear section and let my brain go loose, I saw my mother’s eyes come open. I saw her mouth begin to move. Her voice echoed deep inside me, clear and brimming, bright, alive. She said, “Don’t worry, son. I’m fat and happy. They have cake here. My hair is clean.” She said, “The earth is slurred and I am sorry.” She said, “You are OK. I have your mind.” Her eyes seemed to swim around me. I felt her fingers in my hair. She whispered things she’d never mentioned. She nuzzled gleamings in my brain. As in: the day I’d drawn her flowers because all the fields were dying. As in: the downed bird we’d cleaned and given a name. Some of our years were wall to wall with wonder, she reminded me. In spite of any absence, we had that. I thought of my father, alone and elsewhere, his head cradled in his hands. I thought of the day he’d punched a hole straight through the kitchen wall, thinking she’d be tucked away inside. All those places he’d looked and never found her. Inside their mattress. In stained-glass windows. How he’d scoured the carpet for her stray hair and strung them all together with a ribbon; how he’d slept with that one lock swathed across his nostrils, hugging a pillow fitted with her nightshirt. How he’d dug up the backyard, stripped and sweating. How he’d played her favorite album on repeat and loud, a lure. How when we took up the carpet in my bedroom to find her, under the carpet there was wood. Under the wood there was cracked concrete. Under the concrete there was dirt. Under the dirt there was a cavity of water. I swam down into the water with my nose clenched and lungs burning in my chest but I could not find the bottom and I couldn’t see a thing.

We trained outdoors — even in the winter time. There would be snow on the ground and we’d be in the backyard carrying the logs, using the sledgehammers, and sprinting hills. I felt like this was real life Rocky IV.

We’d walked over to my car while Torrance talked, and I’d pulled out my keys. Now I stopped with my fingers on the car door handle. “Dug up the backyard?” I echoed incredulously. Come to think of it, that wasn’t so surprising. I thought about it for a moment. Okay, something that could be kept in a hole in the ground as well as hidden in a house.

I think of our backyard pond growing up. Of the goldfish we’d bring home, bobbing in plastic bags on the surface of the water. My dad explained they needed time to adjust to the temperature of the pond before being released. If such a small creature required such care, imagine the complex process a victim must work through in order to integrate back into daily life.

Do you know why Chinese are out here doing this kind of work? It’s because the Europeans and Americans can’t.” “Why not?” I asked. “The French did the original work here.” Actually, the French used forced labor here and in other African colonies, as I indicated earlier. “Yes, but the French can’t work like that anymore. The Americans are a little bit better, but the French, definitely not. But it’s not because we can eat bitter; it’s because we have no choice. Of course we would like to live like Westerners. Of course we’d like to take vacations and to go home frequently, but we can’t. The Americans are smart. They take jobs that win them big profits. But we are a poor society and we’re struggling to rise higher. We’re stuck with work that doesn’t make much money.” I said the Chinese companies wouldn’t be out this far off the beaten path if there wasn’t decent money to be made. “The problem is that there are too many of our companies chasing after this kind of work,” he said. “China is screwed. We have so many people that we have no choice but to go overseas to look for whatever work we can find.” Narrowly speaking, he was absolutely right. But there was so much more to what had drawn China to a place like Mali. Rising powers throughout history have forever faced a simple but fateful choice: whether to take on the established players in their backyards, in places where their interests are greatest and most deeply entrenched, or try to expand into relatively uncontested zones of the world.

Some children (three solemn-faced kids who, with their mother, were staying with us until their mother’s ex-husband quit threatening them) had made too much noise in Kyle’s pool after seven P.M., which was when Mr. Francis went to bed. We should make sure that all children were in their beds and silent so as not to disturb Mr. Francis if we didn’t want the police called. We’d thought it was a joke, had laughed at the way he’d referred to himself as “Mr. Francis” in his own notes. The grapes along the solid eight-foot-tall stone fence between the backyards were growing down over Mr. Francis’s side. We should trim them so he didn’t have to look at them. He saw a dog in the yard (me) and hoped that it was licensed, fixed, and vaccinated. A photo of the dog had been sent to the city to ensure that this was so. And so on. When the police and the city had afforded him no satisfaction, he’d taken action on his own. I’d found poisoned meat thrown inconspicuously into the bushes in Kyle’s backyard. Someone dumped a batch of red dye into the swimming pool that had stained the concrete. Fixing that had cost a mint, and we now had security cameras in the backyard. But we didn’t get them in fast enough to save the grapes. He’d been some kind of high-level CEO forcibly retired when the stress gave him ulcers and other medical problems.

In Santa Fe her whole yard had been crowded with different-sized terra-cotta pots, out of which she grew everything from rosemary and lavender to ornamental pear and plum trees and even peppers, although they were not particularly popular with the bees. In Colorado she'd created a fertile oasis out of old gas cans and cut-off oil drums. Her neighbors had been skeptical to begin with but once her creepers grew up and her flowers draped down and her shrubs fluffed out, the junkyard ugly duckling was transformed into the proverbial backyard swan.

Ernest and Bob shared a look. “Why don’t we cross that bridge when we come to it, all right? From the looks of it, we’ve got plenty of time.” Ernest moved closer to Bob and whispered something in his ear. Bob faced me again. “Also, Nola? I’m guessing that’s your grandpa we’ve seen on the front porch smoking his pipe? Please let him know that secondhand smoke is a thing, and we’d appreciate it if he would smoke in the backyard?” He smiled to let me know he was just being neighborly and not antagonistic. They were good neighbors, with the free food and with the bagged dog poop they religiously removed from the sidewalks, and I wanted them to know that I appreciated them

underneath it, and Leigh got mad. Not as mad as the time Bryce dipped her hairbrush in the fish tank, but mad enough to tell her dad. He came in and sat on my bed and grinned for about five minutes, then left. The hardest thing we’ve ever done is move from Illinois. When we drove away from our little house, it seemed like we left every friend we’d ever had. The new people were already moving in, which was sad. We’d written our names in the cement by the driveway. Half of Dylan’s car collection is still buried in the backyard. The cheap swing set my mom bought at a garage sale is still under that big, leafy tree. My friend Carolyn said she was jealous of me getting to move out west, making a new start. I would have traded places

1) A “Ladies Who Lunch Party” thrown at the country club. Waiters carried hors d’oeuvres around, kneeling on the ground so that the little girls could reach them. The lunch was nicer than Jane’s wedding shower, possibly nicer than her wedding. 2) A “Movie Premiere Party” where the entire theater was rented out and the kids were allowed as much popcorn and candy as they wanted while watching a double feature of Moana and Monsters, Inc. (Lauren threw up in her bed that night.) 3) A “Camping Party” where each child received a sleeping bag personalized with her name and the backyard was set up with mini pink tents and paper lanterns. Someone was hired to grill the hot dogs and make the s’mores. 4) A “Spa Party” at the Four Seasons downtown where the girls got facials and fluffy pink robes and slippers. (Because what first grader wouldn’t appreciate getting rid of clogged pores?)

I want the wedding sooner rather than later. I’m not wasting another minute without making you my wife. You can have anything you want. A big church wedding. A backyard barbecue. A five-figure wedding dress. But I have one demand.” Of course it was a demand and not a request. “What’s that?” “I want daisies in your hair.

want the wedding sooner rather than later. I’m not wasting another minute without making you my wife. You can have anything you want. A big church wedding. A backyard barbecue. A five-figure wedding dress. But I have one demand.” Of course it was a demand and not a request. “What’s that?” “I want daisies in your hair.

I think of our backyard pond growing up. Of the goldfish we’d bring home, bobbing in plastic bags on the surface of the water. My dad explained they needed time to adjust to the temperature of the pond before being released. If such a small creature required such care, imagine the complex process a victim must work through in order to integrate back into daily life. There is no right way, there is only listening to what is good and comfortable for your body. Maybe now you are terrified, bobbing inside the clear plastic container around you, thinking, I am trapped, this is not how it’s supposed to be. Just remember: the temperature is slowly changing, you are adjusting. You will make it into that pond. With a little more time, you’ll be free.

I held Shea’s warm body in my arms and wandered around the backyard, pretending to be interested in the flower beds that lined the walls. But my thoughts were anywhere but on the exotic-looking flowers. For the first time in close to a year, I felt trapped. As sweet as they were, I wanted to get away from the people here. As much as I wanted to marry Kash, I wanted to get away from all the wedding planning. As happy as I was being here, I wanted to get away from Florida. I just wanted to run. I wanted to go back in time five years and enjoy the last few months with my parents all over again. I wouldn’t have taken a second with them for granted. Hell, I wouldn’t have let them go on that stupid trip in the first place. My throat burned, and I looked down at Shea when she lazily dragged her head so her other cheek was lying on me. My parents hadn’t been there for my high school graduation—and being in my catatonic state, I had felt like I wasn’t present for it either. But everything happening now? Everything that was to come? They wouldn’t be there, and I needed them. I’d needed my mom there with me when I bought my dress. I needed my dad there to walk me down the aisle and give me away to Kash. And I needed them there for whenever we had kids. They were supposed to be there through all of it, and they couldn’t. How was I supposed to get through everything without them? Shea’s little hand fisted around the collar of my shirt again and I swallowed the imaginary lump in my throat when realization set in. I wasn’t sure I could get through everything without them. Kash

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artists and acrobats, the walls were enough to keep most people in. I don’t get super strength or scary points. But speed is my friend, and I caught her flat-footed because she thought one thing was happening when it was really something else. She thought I was running from her—and I was just trying to get up some speed. I ran for the wall. I don’t know what she thought I was doing, but she chased me hard for most of the distance. But as I approached the giant stone wall that surrounded the grounds, she slowed, anticipating that I would be stopped by it. A few months ago, a bunch of the pack had been at Warren’s house watching a Jackie Chan movie—I don’t remember which one because we were having a marathon—and Jackie just ran up a wall like magic. Warren had a wall around his backyard. Someone stopped the movie, and we’d all gone out and tried it. A lot. The werewolves had gotten moderately proficient, but my light weight and speed had made me the grand champion. The trick is to find a corner and have enough speed to make it to the top. Instead of stopping at the wall, I Jackie-Channed it up the stone surfaces and leaped over. I caught the werewolf totally by surprise. I don’t expect Bonarata and she watched old martial arts movies together. It didn’t seem like that kind of relationship. Her pause meant that the wolf, who could have caught me because as agile as I’d learned to be imitating Jackie Chan, going up was still slower than going forward, had missed her chance. I didn’t intend to give her another. I changed to coyote as I came off the top of the wall. I’m not a were-anything. It takes them time to change from human to wolf. I could do it—well, in this case I could do it in the time it took me to drop off the wall. I landed on four feet, running as fast as I could down a narrow road that was walled on both sides. I had no idea where I was, but out was a good direction, and I didn’t hesitate as I headed one way. Nor did I slow

I don’t think it likes being held by the tail like you’re doing,” she said. “It needs to be supported in two places with two hands, like this.” “Yeah, well, I hope it bites you,” Russell said, still trying to scare us. “It can’t bite me, because I have a grip on its neck. It can’t turn its head to strike at me.” “Snakes don’t have necks,” Russell hooted. “Snakes are all neck.” Conversations with Russell never got anyplace, so I thought we’d better end this one.

Lindsay, I’m so sorry this has happened to you,” he said. “Both you and Greta have been doing a fine thing for those animals. I know how much work you have put into caring for them. But the law is clear on this matter. I wish it were otherwise.” “Well, I’m not going to obey the law,” I sputtered. “I don’t agree with it. Anyway, Troll and Nutkin and Rocky Star are more important than any law! Besides, who made up such a law? God? No! Just a lot of dumb men who think they have the right to kill animals.” “Now, Lindsay, stop and think a minute. Maybe you don’t like the law, but you still must obey it. What if everyone decided to obey only those laws that they agreed with? We’d be in big trouble then.” Now I knew what my mother meant when she said that it’s impossible to argue with my dad when he puts on his lawyer’s cap. He made me so mad that I began to shout. “You’re not on my side,” I yelled. “You don’t care how I feel or what happens to our animals. You can have your old law. I’m not going to let anyone take away our animals. They’d have to shoot me first.

Miranda was still trying to process the intrusion. “Just tell me one thing--how do you guys get away with sneaking out at night? My mom would have a fit!” “Right.” Parker’s grin turned scornful. “Like my mom and dad ever know if I’m there or not.” Ashley was totally unconcerned. “Oh, we just tell them we’re going to the tree house. They never check on us there.” “What’s the tree house?” Miranda wanted to know. “Well, when we were little, Gage’s daddy built a tree house for the three of us in his backyard. We used to have a secret club. And we’d play over there, and hide from people, and pretend we were knights in a castle.” “Gage and I were knights,” Roo corrected her. “You always had to be rescued.” “Well, I liked the way Gage threw me over his shoulder and carried me down from the tower.” “Gage did that?” Clasping his hands over his heart, Parker sighed. “My hero.” Gage ignored him. “We used to camp out in that tree house at night.” Ashley nibbled a potato chip. “In fact, we still like sleeping together over there.” Parker wiggled his eyebrows and gave Miranda a stage whisper. “Very kinky.” “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Parker--not that kind of sleeping together.” Ashley paused for a second. “It is just Gage, after all.” Gage stared at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Oh, nothing.” Ashley plopped down on the bed next to Miranda. “Just that we love and respect you so much, we wouldn’t dream of taking advantage of you.” “Sometimes I dream of you two taking advantage of him,” Parker said seriously. “It’s one of my favorite fantasies.” Gage tried unsuccessfully not to look embarrassed. “You need a life.

Well, when we were little, Gage’s daddy built a tree house for the three of us in his backyard. We used to have a secret club. And we’d play over there, and hide from people, and pretend we were knights in a castle.” “Gage and I were knights,” Roo corrected her. “You always had to be rescued.” “Well, I liked the way Gage threw me over his shoulder and carried me down from the tower.” “Gage did that?” Clasping his hands over his heart, Parker sighed. “My hero.” Gage ignored him.

On our first night looking at the new book, we marveled over the photo and description of Argiope aurantia, the Black and Yellow Argiope spider, common throughout the United States. And the very next day, for the first time ever, we found a wriggling cluster of freshly emerged argiope spiderlings under the lowest wooden step of our back deck. While Claire hovered over the spiderlings and sketched them in her notebook, I wondered over the fact that if we'd found these spiders just the day before, we would have known nothing about them. And I was sure, on some level, that it was learning about them that allowed us to find them, Whenever I renew a commitment to studying raptors or gulls or crows or the birds in my backyard, more are given, more show themselves. Our efforts are rewarded, our studies are enhanced in experience. I cannot explain this, and I am reluctant to sound too woo-woo but we can take this as confidently as if it came from the Oracle at Delphi: the more we prepare, the more we are "allowed" somehow to see. This is a guarantee: select a subject, obtain a proper field guide, study it well, and you will see more than you ever have of your chosen subject — and more than that besides.