Ahhh…. A sunny holiday afternoon, a gathering of the clan, what a perfect day for a picnic!
This was in 1982; I remember driving over the Peace Bridge from my home in Fort Erie, having endured holiday traffic (Fourth of July/Canada Day) to finally arrive at the sunny little home where my dad and Carol lived on the spacious corner lot in Lewiston. The yard was filled with beautiful mature trees – white birch, oak, pine and maple. There were flowers everywhere; including the gorgeous Wandering Jew that dad planted every year spilling out of the rusty old green wheel barrow. There was a swing and a heavy wooden picnic table and lots of lawn furniture. One could play croquet as well as horseshoes. It was our own private sun-dappled paradise.
Part of the family had assembled for this occasion and I believe there were at least five adults and one small child. Russ and Marjorie were there, along with Matt who would have been very young, and perhaps Aunt Jessie or Grandma Georgia or both? Grandma Georgia died in November of 1982 so perhaps she was with us that day. As preparations were being made to take the food out into the back yard for our picnic, someone, probably my dad, got the brilliant idea to “go to Canada” for our picnic – Niagara on the Lake, to be exact.
So the adults loaded two vehicles with folding chairs, folding tables, and all of the foil wrapped platters of food (I remember fried chicken and potato salad),as well as jugs of lemonade and iced tea, serving utensils and condiments and paper plates and plastic forks and napkins and table cloths and the child. We caravanned our way to the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge where, as I recall, we waited, creeping slowly through the holiday traffic, for several hours before finally attaining our destination – then we had to find a place to park along the lakeshore. Had to be a scenic location, of course, for the photographers!
It was already late in the afternoon when we found an empty picnic table, hauled all of the stuff out of the vehicles, and then we discovered why this particular picnic table had been empty in this beautiful scenic location on a crowded holiday weekend. The wind off the lake had kicked up considerably, for one thing, but even the wind did not deter the bees. The bees attacked the potato salad with great determination. I recall they were particularly centered on Russ’s potato salad. It ended up being a very hasty picnic meal, all of us fending off bees and trying to grab all of the paper plates and food and keep everything from flying away.
Then, of course, we had to pack everyone and everything back into the vehicles and reverse our tracks and wait on the bridge coming back to Lewiston.
I always thought that if we had been under observation by aliens from outer space they would have though we humans to be perfectly silly.
