A cautionary tale

A woman pulls up her car by a deserted playground, gets out, and walks purposefully to the baby swings. She stands a rather nice drinking bottle carefully in one of the swings, turns around, gets back into her car, and drives away.

What would you think? What crazy drug-running scheme, what secret coded message, what clear-liquid time bomb was this?

Friends, I was that woman. Listen to my story so that you, one day, may avoid the puzzled glances of passing cyclists.

Yesterday Mabel and I went to get Dash from school, as usual. We passed a playground on the way, and waved at a fellow parent who was pushing her adorable baby girl in the swings. At school, Dash boinged out of the building to us, and we turned around smartly to go back whence we had come. As I turned, I noticed the daughter of the fellow parent still waiting, and assured her that we'd just seen her  mom and she'd be here any minute. Sure enough, a few yards further on I saw the mom pull into the parking lot.

Five minutes later we're back at the playground, where we'd arranged to meet some friends. In one of the two baby swings, I spot a rather nice drinking bottle - the glass sort with a wide neck and rubberized stuff over it to make it grippy and less likely to break on impact. Pretty much this one, actually. (So, a $20 water bottle, give or take. Not the sort you want to leave behind.)

I thought it probably belonged to my friend the fellow parent, so I decided to take a chance and bring it home with me, so that I could give it to her the next day at school pickup rather than leaving it in the playground for some unscrupulous person to purloin. (You can see where this is going now, can't you?)

Two hours later, when we got home - after leaving the playdate early because Mabel announced she needed the bathroom in a way that could not be decently taken care of behind a tree - never mind the fact that the city seems to have chopped down any trees big enough to go behind - or provide an iota of shade in the summer for that matter - near that playground - and then finding when we got back to our street that she'd rather play with the neighbour kids than do the poo after all - I Facebook messaged the other mother to let her know I had her drinking bottle.

Nope. I didn't. I had someone else's drinking bottle. Oops.

So, on the way to my board meeting last night I stopped by the playground to put the bottle back where I'd found it, hoping its owner would return again even if they'd already been by once and cursed the unscrupulous person who had taken their $20 water bottle. And I got some pretty curious glances from the cyclist who'd stopped to take in the view and was obviously wondering what on earth I could possibly be doing.

I wonder if it will still be there when we go past this afternoon.