On my recent posting about my trip to Manhattan to see my family, I didn’t mention much about Mark and Harry and used a picture of Teri. So now I’ll cover them.

My grandson, Harry, is 13 years old, and is a real New Yorker. He travels all over on the subway by himself – he amazes me. But this time he was sick with a bad cough . . . no, it wasn’t Swine flu as they took him to the doctor. But he stayed home a couple of days. We even took his temperature one night with my new digital thermometer which I hate. I thought the standard number was 98.6 for people, but I could never get it up past 97 for me. Mark made a nasty crack to the effect he had always found me cold. I ignored him. We all watched as Harry sat with it in his mouth. I was hanging over the back of the couch and watching it click, very slowly, upwards. It finally reached 98.3 at which time we had grown tired of the whole thing, and I rescued the thermometer so could we move on to more interesting things. I assume he had a little temperature since it went up past 97, but not the Swine flu kind. So I spent a couple of days, sitting on the couch with Harry beside me as he coughed this horrible cough. But we had fun.

Mark took me to Brooklyn one day and we went to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens which is a beautiful place. We didn’t have much time to look all over as they were closing soon, but we did see some gorgeous blooms. We saw lots of Japanese Wisteria – the reason I know it was Japanese is there was a pretty Japanese woman there who told us. Do you suppose they pay her to stand under the wisteria, look pretty and tell people about the flower? I figured it was the real thing, and it was beautiful. Mark was using my camera and became enthralled with the wisteria - or possibly the pretty woman - and kept taking pictures of it which, of course, all looked the same! I finally grabbed the camera away from him and we went on our way. But then he saw something that stopped him in his tracks. It was a birch tree and he went crazy over the bark on it. So he took the camera and got up really, really close to the tree trunk and took the bark picture. I then rescued the camera and we had to leave as the Gardens were then closing. I’m sending him the bark picture and the wisteria pictures. I wonder if he’ll frame the bark picture.

One of the above pictures is obviously the bark, and the other one is my grandson in his Swine flu mode under a blanket. I had a wonderful time with all of them.