Sibling Outing

There’s a rose garden my brothers and I used to go to.
When we visited our grandparents in August and we wanted to get out of the house,
We would walk through the park,
Down by the little river and over the bridge, where I had once lost my purple glitter ball.
We stopped by every pond we saw, throwing stones and listening for their plop.
I loved these walks, we always took at least one when we visited,
So the adults could spend time together and we could run around,
Though, we were not the running types.
On the way to the garden, was a fallen willow tree, still exuberant with green,
Drinking from the large lake.
I would walk on its trunk and try not to fall off when my brothers would throw stones in the lake.
There were hardly ever any flowers in the grass.
When we got to the roses,
Trees lined our way down the concrete paths that forked in every direction.
This was not the sort of park where people were loud,
In fact, I remember feeling like we had disturbed everyone by going there.
It seemed like the place where people went for contemplation.
One of my brothers would climb trees and sit quietly in the them,
Another would play frisbee with the other,
And I would just watch.
I was too afraid of getting hurt if I climbed a tree,
And I wasn’t able to catch or throw a frisbee yet.
He took that frisbee everywhere in the summer.
It had a lime green rim and was marked with scratches,
But it lasted years.
I don’t know what happened to it.
The roses were always pink or red,
Stood in bunches like that children’s story.
We would spend maybe an hour at most there,
Then we made our way to the supermarket and bought the Dutch treats we couldn’t get in England.
We would choose a tree in another park, just across from the supermarket and eat and laugh,
Until we had no food left and walked back to Oma en Opa’s.