Sweet as Pie
My summer of slow is moving too fast! It’s now August and the back to school bugs sing us to sleep and yellow buses are popping up next to us at red lights. I still haven’t quite figured out how January-March seems to go by so much slower than June-August, but somehow, it always does. If you’ve been following along on social media, we’ve logged some serious hours at various “Pick Your Own” (or “PYO” for us serious pickers lol) around town. You name it, we’ve picked it -strawberries, blueberries, peaches, raspberries — and we’ve haven’t even gotten to apple season yet! I’ve washed, jammed, canned, frozen, and baked our summer bounty. I envision cracking open a can of summer peaches in the middle of January when I’m in desperate need of some edible sunshine.
It’s so funny how in the world of DoorDash and Instacart, we find ourselves paying more money to be “inconvenienced.” Meaning, instead of buying berries from the store that were shipped in from somewhere, we’re packing up the kids, heading to a farm, and paying the farmer to pick their fruit lol. My husband always jokes that farmers really have it figured out. We pay for the fruit AND we do the work. But it’s good work. It’s an experience. I love getting lost in a patch of blueberries knowing my boys can’t wander too far. We run into each other eventually and then they demand my full basket in exchange for their empty one — never bothering to fill one up, but rather grazing as they go. It goes like this until we’re hot and sweaty and ready to head home with our harvest.
I love the seasonality of life and how nature’s timing is always so perfect. There is beauty in every month, every season, if we seek it out and savor it. Kids have a way of getting us back into tune with the rhythms of nature and the excitement of each season. In my 20s, I would have known berries were in season in June and peaches were best in August and probably bought some on sale if I saw them. But I wouldn’t have known what a strawberry patch smelled like. I wouldn’t have read “Blueberries for Sal” and then picked blueberries with my own wandering bear cubs. I wouldn’t have known how to make jam and I sure would have never bothered to make blueberry pie. But childhood calls for things like blueberry pies, and jam, and raspberry tarts. And that is one of the countless reasons I have fallen so deeply in love with this season…motherhood.
