Kate and her family joined me at the cabin yesterday, and we’ve already packed in a lot of fun. This afternoon Kate and Tom introduced the boys, whom I nicknamed Raj and Rigo at their births, to fishing.

The boys also climbed around on the granite boulders near the shore, and after discovering tangled messes of used fishing line and candy wrappers, they began to enthusiastically hunt down every piece of trash they could find, crawling into crevices and scrambling up and down to score just one more item, to get the lake shore a tiny bit cleaner.

I identified a new buttercup I hadn’t met before, and saw again the lovely Pearly Everlasting, which in July has just opened the flowers that will continue to look nice for several more weeks.

Later after dinner, while they drank hot cocoa, I read to Raj and Rigo the story of Jack and the Fallen Giants, a recent retelling of the traditional tale by Jonathan Pageau. It has beautiful and evocative illustrations by Eloise Scherrer, and thought provoking elements such as riddles: “What has more weight, heaven or earth?”

In this telling, Jack is frequently famished and worn out, but he perseveres and climbs higher and higher every time, and receives bursts of strength that give him renewed zeal.

I think that whether they realized it or not, my grandboys could relate to Jack’s exertions because of all the tasks they’d accomplished for themselves this afternoon. In any case, in spite of a cliffhanger ending, we had a good time reading that story.

Boy adventures to be continued!