Dashing

...but not through the snow. Plenty of rain still though. Today I'm not being a Grinch about Christmas, oh no, the Nature Park, playing its part in the Greater Vancouver 'Festival of Light', is being transformed. Of course to a certain extent it gets in the way. At the pond platform today I had to stop talking about frogs and bugs so that parents could take pictures of all the kids poking their faces through a Christmas cut-out, something Santaracious.

Sometimes I wonder what I sound like when I'm not sounding like the Queen.
'What's the name of the bug that gives off a strange smell when it senses danger?' I asked,
'A police car,' answered a little boy. Ah well.

On a Monday night I go to Writers' group. We meet at different houses every week. When I first started going this forced me to drive across the bridges into Vancouver and that's how I started to get to know it in my head.
Recently, my friend Yvonne has been doing the driving, that was particularly useful when I was unable to drive for a while there. Yvonne knows Vancouver way better than I do, so being her passenger I learned more about it, then the driving lessons.

Last night, with Yvonne away, I had to find my way on my own again, and I realised that I do feel I now know the area. I didn't have to have my google map, ok, I had been to this friend's house before, but I was able to think about which way I would go, try out some new roads. Vancouver and me, we know each other better now.

We refer to our group as 'dashers'. Some of the members write short stories, some have ongoing stories. I love these, look forward to them, all different kinds of story and damn there's some good writing.
Sometimes people try out something else instead of just continuing with their story, then we get annoyed with them, well, ok, I do.
One of the writers, from time to time, writes stories for very small children. Those stories are luminous, they are imaginative, full of colour and beautiful images and skillful use of words.
I see a lot of children's books and stories, and even the best of them are banal in comparison and yet this friend's stories have not yet been published, come close, but not in the end taken up. Yet. It quite literally angers me that I cannot go out and buy these books and read them to my granddaughter. From the stories alone I can imagine the illustrations.

My lists my endless lists are ruling me at the moment. I will be dashing around until I am finally becalmed like a battered little ship, in the departures lounge at Vancouver airport on Thursday.

So I've just dashed this off.