Fireflies and Water Ice

I added the Professor to my AAA membership last night in anticipation of our trip to Oregon on August. The car rental is far less expensive if we’re both on AAA, and I’ll feel better if he’s on it anyhow. The idea was originally to get him his own Triple A membership, but it was only twelve bucks to add him to mine and would have been close to fifty to get him his own. Even I can do the math on that one.

After we got that taken care of, The Professor suggested we go to a small local park I had taken him to last summer when he first came out to visit me. The evening was wonderful – cool, bright, and miraculously mousquito free. We walked, played on the swings, watched fish in the stream, pulled some mulberries out of the trees, and watched the fireflies rise from the ground as dusk settled over the park. Some of the fireflies were tiny – this year’s batch of hatchlings, I guess. The littlest ones glowed with a more yellow light than the ones twice their size, which blinked more of a green color.

I watched him playing with the ash and maple keys in the park last night. A storm had come through last weekend and knocked great clumps of ash keys out of the trees. He picked them up one by one and watched them whirley-gig their way back to the ground. As a joke he picked up a stem with dozens on it and threw it in the air. Of course, it simple fell back to the ground. “See,” he said. “Nothing ever works in a committee.” I had to laugh.

I kept him from bumbling through the poison ivy (they don’t have it in California). I got on a swing that was too high for me, and then couldn’t stop because I couldn’t drag my feet on the ground to brake. He laughed as he finally helped me slow down. He was suspicious of the mulberry, but nibbled an edge of it before tossing it to the birds.

Afterwards, when it started to get too dark to walk the park easily, we stopped and got a water ice. Yes, those of you who don’t live in my area have never heard of a water ice. Other areas call them Italian ices. For some reason, they’re called water ice in my area, and I refuse to change to the more sensible name simply because “water ice” is redundant. He got a blueberry/lime combination, and his tongue was blue afterwards. It was cute, but I didn’t tell him. He’s self-conscious about stuff like that. Besides, he’d only have pointed out that my tongue was green from the lemon/lime combination I had.

Last night was a welcome relief to what had been a stressful weekend. Instead of debating politics (the Professor is a die-hard Socialist, and while I believe in many of the ideals of Socialism, I have a hard time believing human nature would ever allow such a system to work), enduring long silences, and bickering over dishes we spent time enjoying each other’s company. I suspect he set up last night specifically to help us get past last weekend.

I remembered last night why I fell in love with him.