The setting: Grandma’s house. A backyard full of treasures, flowers, and old twisty branches retrieved from the last time the rhododendrons were pruned. An ancient Camelia bush with twisting branches that has been pruned up to look like a small tree.
The players: an eccentric grandmother who collects sticks, an eccentric grandfather who collects rocks, a grown daughter, four children aged 4-9 years of age who have been raised in the wilds of Homer, Alaska.
Add: a Harry Potter closet (it was once referred to as a “stairwell closet”, but J.K. Rowling changed all that), and a wee green wren purchased from JoAnn Fabrics or Michaels many moons ago.
Birdie (the wren refers to herself as) roosts in the Harry Potter closet with two of the four grandchildren, one of whom has read the first three Harry Potter books. Birdie carries notes with her to bed: “How many clocks can you find in the house and garage?” (18, I’m told). “Can you find an alligator named Winston?” (He was in the garden, holding a tarp down.) “How many frogs can you find?” (they only found five and needed help finding the other two – just a gentle nudge in the right direction).
Grandma had a doctor’s appointment this morning and, since it is pay day, she needed to buy groceries and toilet paper. Especially toilet paper. Oh, and some legal fireworks. Birdie, being a rather practical creature, carried a note to the Harry Potter closet with specific instructions to “build a fort in the yard, using the sticks on the back porch, string that can be found under the kitchen sink, and sheets that can be found in the laundry room.
Grandpa, thinking ahead of Birdie, brought out tarps and more.
Grandma and Birdie don’t have any idea how much Grandpa helped, but here’s the end result:
Weisser’s Fort. No Adults Allowed.
Miss V. wants to have a “dance party” in there tomorrow night, but it will probably wait until Wednesday when all the solar garden lights are charged and the temperatures are in the nineties.
Tomorrow we get to play with something novel to any Alaska kid (where even sparklers are contraband): snakes, sparklers, legal fireworks, and an amazing neighborhood display of illegal fireworks in 3-D (crane your neck and someone else is shooting off bottle rockets: east, west, north, south, and all variables in between).
All we need are my six other grands to make it complete. (Another year, I’m sure.)
Jaci Dawn 
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