Grandma Sadie called me up on the phone
about a week after I got home.
“I just received a very nice thank-you note,” she said,
“from a very nice granddaughter.”
“That’s me!” I said.
And then I had to say,
“Can you hold on a second, please?”
Because my little puppy,
Antoine,
was trying hard to climb into my lap.
His wagging tail almost knocked over
the new double picture frame on our coffee table,
with my mom’s camp picture on the left
and mine just beside her on the right.
“Careful!” I said,
lifting him up.
He licked my face,
and I set him on my lap.
“Sorry about that,”
I told Grandma Sadie.
“I’m back now.”
“I hear there’s a new member of the family,”
she said.
“And that you’re taking good care of him.”
“I’m bad about feeding him from the table,”
I said.
I had to laugh,
because he was climbing all over me.
“Otherwise, I’m very good.”
“He must have been a wonderful surprise,”
Grandma Sadie said.
I almost said, “That’s true.”
But I caught myself
and thought for a minute instead.
I thought of soaring through the air with Joplin,
and Cornelius’s brown eyes.
I thought of delicious croutons
and tetherball.
I thought of treading water the longest
and taking a camp picture of my very own.
And then I said,
“Sometimes—
not always,
but definitely sometimes—
camp was a wonderful surprise.”
