12 years old again

i think the last time i went berry picking was when i was a kid. once i realized that in my mom's mind, berry picking meant getting to the berry patch by eight in the morning, i lost interest. summer meant getting to sleep in! i had no desire to get up with the birds—even if it did mean dewy-fresh strawberries. i figured either way, i'd get to eat the berries...mom was going anyway.

today i went berry picking at the extremely reasonable time of 2:20 ish in the afternoon. perfect! it was a great day for it—blue sky, fluffy clouds, in the 70s, cool breezes to counteract the bit of humidity. my kind of day. we picked quickly and got a decent bunch of red raspberries, blueberries & black raspberries in an hour and a half. we pulled up to pay for them as the first rain drops fell. i think i read somewhere that the Lord cares about the little stuff!

okay, but black raspberries are where the title of this post comes from! when i popped that first perfectly ripe, glossy black berry in my mouth today, i was 12 years old again, standing at the side of my house on Sunset Avenue, popping perfect berries into my mouth right off the bush. every summer, it became part of the day to meander around, checking out the berry bushes we had to see how many ripe ones we could find. we didn't bother with containers all that often. not too many years later, we had the neighbor kids helping themselves, so it was tough to get to the berries before they did (they, of course, were early risers).

but today, i could almost smell the water sizzling on the cement during one of our wild water wars—i could see the wood of our front porch railings supporting our rambling bush. and i could for sure taste that perfect sweetness that nothing added could improve.