The garden needed to be planted.
Supper needed to be cooked.
There was one load of laundry left in the washing machine that was, unfortunately, drying itself.
Not good.
I arrived home, all work weary and adult like, trying to figure out how I could juggle all of the above and still watch one episode of The Musketeers on Netflix, practice my piano and get myself to bed before I turned into a pumpkin or something else less than human.
But as John Lennon pointed out so many years ago, “Life is what happens when you make other plans.”
As it turns out, Lennon was absolutely one hundred per cent correct.
In this instance, life happened to be a nine-year-old girl and a ball game.
My husband and I arrived at the ball diamond, somewhat breathless and slightly late, but nevertheless, we were there.
We were there when our granddaughter threw her first pitch, dead centre, straight across home plate.
And we were there when her pitches went a little wild and she couldn’t seem to find home plate.
And we were there when she made that hit that got her to first base and eventually to third and we were there when the game ended and she was, unfortunately, stuck on third.
We cheered and hugged her and told her she was awesome and she did good.
And then we went home.
And I noticed that when I took my sunglasses off it wasn’t really dark, so I could probably still plant at least some of those tiny seeds I had bought two days ago with optimism and Interac in mind.
There were two messages on the phone when I got home. Both were from one of my sisters.
“I really need to talk,” she said.
“What?” I said to myself in exasperation. “Now!”
A serious illness has rendered my dearly beloved sibling unable to get about without the aid of a walker or a wheelchair. In the last few months, her youngest daughter died.
Really, if she needed to talk, I knew, in my heart, my garden could wait.
And so we talked. Actually I talked.
I told her about memories. I told her how I remembered how she used to water-ski, how she used to make a great rooster tail of water behind her, dropping one ski and gliding in and out of the wake, all effortlessly and gracefully.
And, along the walk down memory lane, I talked about long ago summers when we used to laugh and sing and the sun would shimmer on the water and we would both be ridiculously happy, just hanging out, sisters, but more importantly, friends.
And I told her how lucky we were that we had those days of summer, and if we just allowed it to happen, we could go there again in our mind, to a time and a place when the sun was warm on our faces and life was simple and good.
And, even as I talked, I thought about a nine-year-old girl with curly dark hair and eyes so blue you can swim in them. A girl on the pitcher’s mound, leaning back, making the pitch, a girl racing to first base and finally, being stuck on third when the game ended.
And I suddenly realized, just by being there, at the game, we had made a memory.
As I said before, the garden can wait!
Treena Mielke is the editor of the Rimbey Review and writes a regular column for The Pipestone Flyer.