sistawendy | green trees and yellow paper

I told Much Younger Woman that my feet & back weren't, as NASA says, nominal. She had an excellent plan B: Boeing Creek Park, which has trails maybe a little shorter than the one around Green Lake, only through sun-dappled woods and over hills and along - you guessed it - a creek. You can tell that it's a Shoreline park and not a Seattle park because it's not quite as scrupulously maintained; parts of the trail along the creek were washed out. But we're rough, tough dykes, and we hiked it - MYW in a dress and me in a skirt. There's an off-leash dog area in one corner of the park, so it isn't too surprising that we saw lots of puppers. A+ would hike again!

One taro bubble tea with MYW later, I bopped over to the old place for one of the last few times for dinner & dog walking. My ex had a stack of cards & letters to me, mostly from my Evil Sister before she turned to evil, but one lovely letter from my father dated January 25, 1989. He held forth in his elegant handwriting about the passing of his own father a year earlier, and how proud he was of his father and (then) son. I cried after I read it through. Then I tried reading it to my son and I couldn't even make it to the end.

What would he think of where I am now? I've written before about how I'm not entirely sure he'd have been OK with the gender switcheroo; I was, after all, his third and final try for a son. But careerwise? I'm doing all right, but hardly stellar. My own son's lack of ambition would have appalled him at least as much as it does me. As Mom points out, though, the Wendling's got nothing on my Evil Sister, and even she eventually snapped out of it.