We have our overnight fundraiser called Relay for Life for cancer research tomorrow night in a town nearby. We raise money all year, my (our!) team of 10 women breakfasts: garage sales, barbecues, theatre nights, name it – and then one night a year – tomorrow! – we join up with dozens of other teams from our area to walk through the night together, at a local fairground. Two team members at a time walk for half an hour and then two more replace them, from 7 pm til 7 am.
We pitch our tents; share stories; I run a Trivia Challenge for everyone at around midnight every year; and we eat junk food and gab. Our team’s theme this year is Mary Poppins, thus our campsite will resemble a rooftop, complete with chimneys and smokestacks, and sprouting form these foam board cut into curls of smoke in various shapes. Suspended above all this will be twinkling lights, and a silhouette of Mary Poppins herself flying aloft (we’ll rig it somehow, not sure how quite yet, maybe good ol’ fishing line), her umbrella unfurled, her carpet bag in hand.
I am glueing plastic daisies to my hat today, and preparing my outfit – long black skirt, fitted tweed jacket, ankle length lace-up red leather boots, and of course, my trusty tartan umbrella. I even found an initial M to iron on to my jacket lapel. I bring the baking naturally. Doing a “high tea” theme this year in keeping with the very proper English theme of Mary Poppins. Scones, raisin and cranberry orange, homemade jam, mini-cinnamon buns and fudge brownies, and two decadent layer cakes, one filled with caramel, the other with chocolate mousse. My BAD. But my teammies need carbs for energy at 3 in the morning.
Reason for all this fuss? Only the best cause ever: Reducing cancer in our lifetimes.
A sequence of my poems has been published in a hardcover book entitled The Music of Leaving Poems by Tricia McCallum