Dear Grandad,
Here I am again. I’m sorry that it has taken me so long to write to you again – hopefully my letter will make up for this.
I think I told you in my last letter that the best thing about our new house is the garden. It’s SO nice having somewhere to play outside and I also like to take my book out and sit in a chair reading, with the sun shining down on me and the breeze blowing (but not too much!). Sometimes Mum or Dad will bring me a drink and a biscuit and I will stay out there for ages.
The garden is not actually very big, just bigger than our old one. It’s mostly at the front of the house. There is a high hedge running down between our house and next door (they are joined together) with a narrow gravel path from the front door to the road. There is also a big hedge running along the front of the house so it is impossible to see into the garden from outside and where the path meets the front gate the hedge goes up and over making a big arch shape above the little wooden gate. It means that if someone comes to the gate you only see their top half peeping through the gap in the hedge – it is like they don’t have any legs! I like the arch but Dad says it is a “right pain” to keep tidy. The gate is in one corner of the garden, immediately in front of the door for the house. At the other end of the front wall (there is a small wall below the hedge) the wall gets bigger and bends around the side of the house to the garages and then joins up with the back of the house. There is a lane that runs off the road at the front, around past our house and then along behind all of the other houses in the road, but because we are on the end of the row we don’t really see these. All of the streets around here have lanes at the back like this and they often have piles of rubbish and things that people have just dumped around because they don’t need them anymore. I don’t like the way the lanes are so untidy. Where the front garden finishes there is a little gap between the side of the house and the garages and then a small sort of triangle shaped courtyard that is squashed in between the house, the garages and the back wall. You can get into this area from the kitchen and also through a gate onto the lane and once you are in it you are completely secret!
Back to the garden… apart from the hedges, there are some quite large bushes around the edge of some grass. It‘s not a big area of grass but it’s big enough for us to play a bit. One of the bushes is holly but I’m sorry that I don’t know what any of the other ones are called as I think you would like to know about that. Sometimes we can have the paddling pool out which is fun and Annie likes to kick a football around and try to do keepie-uppies but she is not very good at them – she’d be cross if she knew I had written that!
The other thing that I like about the garden is that there are usually birds visiting. Dad likes to put food out for the birds so there are quite a few bird feeders hanging from the branches. I have seen quite a lot of different types already – lots of sparrows, a robin, some blue tits and yesterday there were some pretty ones called goldfinches. Dad was really pleased about this as he had just put out some special seeds for them and they came straight away. It was like they were magic seeds. The other birds that we see lots of are the pigeons. I don’t like the pigeons very much. Sometimes they can look quite nice but they are often all scraggy and twisted looking and they flap about a lot. When they fly in there are always lots of them and they seem to push the other birds out of the way. Also, one day there was a dead pigeon lying on the grass and Dad had to go out to pick it up and put it in the bin. I didn’t look at it too much but it was really yucky.
We have another visitor to the garden sometimes (quite often) and that is the cat from next door. It is mostly black with some white fur underneath and on two of its paws. I like to see it and it would be nice to make friends with it but mostly it seems to want to run around making the birds fly about. I think it would be nice to have a cat to stroke and spend time with. You could tell it all of your secrets and no-one else would know except you and your special cat friend.
Sorry, I have to go now as Mum is calling me down for tea. I will try to come back and draw a picture of the garden for you later if I can.
Lots of love,
Kate
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