The luxury of an alert child

Times

25-05-2025

My children and I find flatulence funny. (Which in itself is a luxury. As the meme says: if you choose not to, you're choosing a life with less joy and exactly the same amount of flatulence.) My mother, on the other hand, not so much. So, as we unpacked our shopping from the wonderful North American paper grocery bags on the first day in our rented holiday cottage in Canada and my daughter asked, 'What's that smell?' I ignored her. In fact, I ignored her the first three times she asked, certain it was a set-up to a joke to which my mother would respond with pursed lips.
I carried on folding the bags, stacking them neatly near the hob while I looked around for the recycling. The fourth 'What's that smell?' coincided with the fire alarms going off and smoke emerging from the pile of paper bags. I grabbed them as they burst (surprisingly quickly) into flames, threw them into the sink and turned on the taps. Disaster averted, I turned off the offending hob and looked around to see where everyone was.
It's hard to find words to express the velocity with which my son had left the building at the first peep of the smoke alarm. A nine-year-old health and safety enthusiast, he moved with the impetus of a bolt leaving the world's most powerful crossbow. In the manner of Road Runner, with legs moving so fast they were invisible to the naked eye, he'd got practically halfway home across the Atlantic before coming to rest at a place he deemed sufficiently safe (on the gravel, as he figured that it couldn't catch fire). Whereas his twin sister had gone upstairs to rescue her cuddly toys.
The rest of the holiday passed without incident. Surrounded by happy, cool Canadian cousins, there was no pretentious 'forest bathing', we simply swam in the lake surrounded by wild woods. There was no 'wellness meditation', just sitting on the dock in a wet swimsuit listening to the crickets, the wind in the trees, the water lapping the shore and the call of the loons (large, ducklike birds), which sound like homesick owls.
Excitement bookended our trip, however. On our last day a truly biblical downpour lasted a full 12 hours. It was the sort of rain you see on news bulletins; you wouldn't have raised an eyebrow if you'd seen a weatherman being blown horizontally past the kitchen window. The only thing for it was to take off our clothes and cavort outside, dancing naked in the rain. My mother, unsurprisingly, recused herself. She captured the happy moment on film and the video shows my daughter leaping, graceful and free, while her brother and I gingerly tiptoe around for fear of stubbing our toes. Win some, lose some.