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.