Our old friend from California days (where Lesley and Peter were born) Brad, his wife Sara, and their kids Mera and Carl, spent the night, visiting from Ohio.
Mera, age 8They spent a few years in London, so we didn’t see much of them for a while.
Carl, 7, in the atelier with the prism on his face as light shone through the leaded glass window.
It was supposed to rain and storm, but the storms thundered all around us and never hit.
Sara on the porch with me while the "kids" - Carl, Don, Brad and Mera - horse about
So there was croquet and other sorts of “horsing about on the lawn” while thunder boomed in the distance.
Don and Carl, instant buddies
Let me ‘splain. When Don and I were in Scotland in 1980 (when I was pregnant with Lesley!), staying at a b&b, a British couple met us at breakfast and became excited because we were Americans and they could finally ask Americans a burning question.
“When we were touring Windsor Castle last year, we heard an American couple talking. The husband said he was going to go inside, and his wife said, I’m going to stay out here and ‘horse about on the lawn.’”
“What does that mean, ‘horse about on the lawn’!?”
We had to explain that they’d gotten the idiom slightly wrong; it was “horsing around on the lawn” and that “horsing around” just means doing nothing productive except relaxing, playing, whatever.
I had to look up this idiom online and see what the origin was. I found this site called “Sports Talk” which says that it came from horse racing.
Horse around–to waste time; to be careless
"During the meeting the boss shouted, 'Stop horsing around and get to work.'"
Maybe not too tough to guess that one, eh?
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