I can't believe I haven't posted in a whole week. And now, I sit here racking my brain for what could have possibly happened last week. Swimming lessons, riding lessons, and a whole lot of lazy summer. I guess that is really a good thing, exactly what summer should be about.
I love the slow pace of summertime, the way the weather just seems to give you a pass on anything except swimming or possibly lemonade. The kids and I did go pick berries on Friday, the reward for a Thursday of running from one appointment or lesson to another...maybe we were busier than I remembered. Anyway, they decided that blackberries were more fun to pick--we filled up a two gallon bucket in just a few minutes--but that they prefer blueberries. Not me!
Blackberries are the taste of weeks in the summer with my paternal grandmother, out on the side of mountain dirt roads in the blackberry brambles. I got to spend a week by myself with my grandparents in North Carolina, from the time I was six until I was going to summer camp at about ten or eleven. Each of those weeks...Mim was a former kindergarten teacher and was always up for a project or a trip. Papier mache, mining for sapphires, cooking, lake swimming, picking blackberries or her home-grown raspberries: I can feel all of these things like they were yesterday. The raspberries always seemed fussy and tame compared to the brambly, tart, fiesty blackberries I loved so much.
I wonder what my kids will remember from their summer days. Somehow, the blackberries in orderly rows, grown by someone and not merely from God's generous hand, don't quite measure up. Maybe we all need some wildness to color our suburban summers.
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