the parade

My oldest daughter, Tanja, and my granddaughter, Kaylee, came out to "the country" to visit me yesterday. (Getting bundled up in case it's cold, in the background the abandoned house across the laneway from my house.) Without snow, this seems as if it should be a Hallowe'en picture!

Together, we went to the Fenelon Falls Santa Claus Parade. Unsure of how the crowds would be, I decided against taking my tri-pod. Bad decision. As a result, the best I could do was get a few video clips.

Anyhow, Granddaughter got hugs from Sponge Bob and Elmo. She got suckers (what we call hard candy on a stick, ie lollypops) from clowns and fairies and snowmen. There were lots of Famous Princesses and other characters we all know. (Gramma admits she tends to forget who they all are.)

I loved the marching bands the best.

The weather was wonderful. During the day, it had been as warm as 11 degrees Celsius, I was told, so it didn't get chilly for the parade until well after the sun had gone down. By then, Santa had arrived and the parade was over.

The indefinable qualities of time, the indistinct edges of it, those subjective aspects that we forget as adults accustomed as we become to concrete, defined beliefs about time, were demonstrated by Kaylee's questions when we got caught in the "traffic jam" leaving town after the parade: "Are we there yet? How long until we get to your house, Gramma?" I'm sure she was asking the same question of her Mom in the car on the way up here, a much longer drive of about an hour and a half. And yet, "time" felt the same way to her in each instance, loose, unformed, stuck.

Kaylee is a chatterbox. (She gets that from her Mom. I have no idea where her Mom gets it from.) She is in her first year of French Immersion. When I said a couple of things to her 'en francais', her response was SILENCE. But behind her eyes, I can see the wheels of her mind whirring. She's taking it all in. Soon she'll be speaking French spontaneously and easily, much more fluently than Gramma will ever hope to speak it.

Thought you might enjoy seeing Gramma, (the pockets of her jacket stuffed with batteries, extra gloves, etc.) from Granddaughter's point of view.