Even though it feels like winter in February in San Francisco and we are wearing our winter coats, still the playground is surrounded by dense bright green hedges. When she was first walking,
more than a year ago, Mabel Watson Payne loved to stand on a bench and investigate the rounded bright green leaves of these playground hedges. On Friday afternoon while I was piling all our paraphernalia onto one end of a bench, Mabel reverted to that leaf-contemplation thing she used to do, and plucked just one, asking me to put it in my pocket so it would get home safe.
