Wordless Wednesday: First Fair

Wordless Wednesday

Fruits of Summer

The strawberries are done for the year, but we are now enjoying black raspberries by the handfuls during our walks and still being able to collect some for freezer jam. Plus our mulberry trees still have several berries that have barely begun to ripen.

Every night that the weather and mosquitoes permit, we take a walk on the paths in our yard. When we get near the mulberry trees he demands to be let out so he can walk over to the tree and pick himself some berries. He also enjoys eating the black raspberries, but we discourage him from picking those himself--he knows all about thorns.

I love that my son already knows where some of his food comes from. Harvesting the garden this year will be great fun for him, if he doesn't pick all the plants before they have a chance to produce.

I love the physical, fleshy, edible, fruits of summer, and the seeds of knowledge that they are planting in my son's mind. One day soon he will bear those fruits as beautifully as this summer has borne her strawberries, black raspberries, and mulberries.

Mulberry Meditation

Last night I picked mulberries while my husband watched our son and dogs. My mind wandered here and there and then came back to picking berries. I thought, this is a meditation. I heard the birds and the traffic and brought myself back to berry picking. I wondered how my guys were doing and came back to berry picking. I stopped to take pictures of the fruit and the insects, and came back to berry picking. I wondered if we were going to get a storm, and brought my mind back to berry picking.

One of the insects I found was a newly hatched grasshopper. He was such a pale, translucent green that his features were unrecognizable from a distance and the camera had a hard time picking him up. I would have missed him if I hadn't picked berries.

I have a problem with holding my breath. I think I always have. I carry a baseline level of stress that makes me stop several times a day and have to start breathing. Even with this pleasant task of berry picking I found myself having to unclench my chest and begin breathing again. I think I need more nights of berry picking.

I wondered why people wanted to get away from picking their own food and got jobs elsewhere. City life and working in an office is something I have grown to hate. I would rather be able to pick berries and can tomatoes and harvest potatoes, but I cannot, and others gave that up in the past. Then I thought, they must have needed to because of drought and insects and the like. If everyone around you looses their crops for a season or worse, several seasons, you start to go hungry. So the first people to leave the farm-life probably had no choice and now every farmer needs to have a second stream of income. Of course later, after I went into the house, I remembered the stock-market crash and the dustbowl and thought, "duh!" I really should remember my history.

The birds were singing so beautifully that I said to myself, "I wish I had a tape recorder. That dates me doesn't it? What do they call recorders now? Is it a MP3 recorder? Of course the traffic's so loud I wouldn't be able to just record the birds." I returned to picking and tried to stay present and "in the moment" but the mosquitoes got worse and I decided insects were the reason people stopped farming and I kept wondering what time it was and if it was time to give my son a bath yet, and the clouds were fast and dark and I figured I would get rained on before long, so inside I went. But I want to go back. I want to do something like this every day. I want to capture a piece of what our great-grandparents had to give up.