Sanna's Bag

“I never seem to have what I need when I need it. I’m going to make a belt-bag that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside, and just carry everything with me.”

Saturday, June 20, 2015

It's berry season!

The weight loss is so much easier now that the fresh fruits are coming on.  I can eat nothing but raspberries and non-fat yogurt for every meal for two days and be happy.  And the local strawberries?  Bliss on a spoon!  Melons are available year-round in the local store, but we are now getting RIPE cantaloupes! (You can tell which one are ripe by looking at the color of the skin under the net.  The more yellow it is, the sweeter.)  Kyle's grandfather taught him how to steal watermelons when he was just a wee lad, and there's no point in stealing a watermelon unless it's the sweetest, ripest, juiciest one in the field, so Kyle has an almost psychic gift for picking the best watermelon in the store.  There's a lot to be said for those little seedless gems, but I do feel nostalgic for the days when we used to sit around the backyard in our swimsuits, eating wedges of watermelon that went up to our ears, dribbling juice all over, spitting seeds at one another, and finally washing all the glorious stickyness off with the hose.

There were summer days when I would put on a swimsuit first thing in the morning, and wear nothing else all day long.  Heck, in my memory, there were entire months like that.  Summer was longer when I was a kid.  And I didn't have time to be bored.  We stayed in the cabin out in the woods all summer and except for showing up for meals, we pretty much ranged free.  Hours went by when I never spoke.  The whole concept of being fully present in the moment?  Yeah, I had some practice in that.

I am remembering the mud pit - a marshy place out in the meadow that I started working on, treading the grass under the surface of the mud, then running in place while the mud got looser and deeper, and looser and deeper.  Cold squishy mud on a hot dry day, climbing up over my ankles, then up my calves.  And I had to climb out on the grassy verge, which then got worked in to the pit as well.  By August I had a slough the size of a bathtub.  I could flop down into it, spread mud liberally over my face, arms and shoulders, then sit there in the 98 degree sunshine, relishing the cool until  the blackbirds came to pick worms out of the freshly churned bog.

I'm fair-skinned, but I tanned well - thank heaven.  I have had one slight bout with skin cancer.  This disease is drastically on the rise now.  Lordy, but I was lucky.  The sun wouldn't kill you in those days.  You could drink out of the crick.  You could eat fruit without having to scrub off the pesticide.  You could play outside all day long and no one had cause to wonder how or where you were. If you didn't make it home for dinner . . . but  everyone always made it home for dinner.  Anything else was unthinkable.

And then, on Labor day, Dad would drive us up the mountain and we would pick huckleberries all morning.  Mom would make huckleberry pie for dinner, and that was the end of the summer.  Back to school the next day.  Back to shoes and and rules and the necessity to come out of my own head and deal with other people.  I LIKE other people, but sometimes, I still get lost trying to find my way out.

5 Comments:

  • At 8:13 AM , Blogger Delighted Hands said...

    Yeah, you are describing my childhood, too, during summer. It was glorious.
    We didn't need classes and camps and clubs-we knew how to have fun all on our own.
    I still do.

     
  • At 8:28 AM , Blogger Tim Young said...

    Lovely bit of life story, thanks for sharing it.
    One summer they tore down the "Projects" near our home.
    Every old home was removed leaving the most beautiful rubble for us to build forts with. Until we got caught tunneling.

     
  • At 4:54 AM , Blogger Donna Lee said...

    I remember being a free range kid too. We'd take off on our bikes and be gone till dinner. And always the bathing suit under my clothers just in case an opportunity to go swimming came along.

    We keep an organic garden, mostly because the chemicals scare me but also so that our children could go out and pick produce and just eat it. My neighbor is returning a favor by "fertilizing" our front lawn. He's killing all my clover and he is pleased about this. I told him I LIKE clover because then the bunnies have something to eat.

     
  • At 4:58 AM , Blogger Saren Johnson said...

    Summers where different when people was young. Now it's video games and swimming lessons. Everything has to be mapped out.

     
  • At 4:13 PM , Blogger Rose L said...

    Ahhh, the good old days!

     

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