Berries.

I am ravenous.
My appetite seems to have no end.

I just discovered huge patches of wild black raspberries in the ditches and woods around my house and….I just can’t stop eating them. I go out and pick them for like an hour a day, risking life and limb and finding myself in precarious situations, praying I have as good of balance as I think I do, just so I can reach the elusive clusters which seem beyond my grasp.

They are not beyond my reach, fyi. Necessity is the mother of invention and I have invented all kinds of ways to reach the little gems.
Just look at them.

 

They are everywhere. I feel such a huge sense of accomplishment when I finish picking one patch, only to walk 15 feet and find ANOTHER.

Which, really, is posing a problem. Because my eyes bug out of my head and my heart starts beating rapidly: “I AM NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO GET THEM ALL!!! They will be gone before I can get to them!” I panic.

Because, the truth is, I really won’t be able to get them all.

But I want to get them all.

In between the picking of the berries, mealtimes have consisted of little else than the eating of the berries. My alarm went off this morning and I smiled. Why? Because I could get up and have berries for breakfast.

And I want to be able to smile for that reason every day.
All year long.
It will be to no avail, however.

So my eyes continue to bulge out of my head and I longingly look out my studio window thinking, “There are berries out there. Ripened by the sun. Ripening RIGHT now. And I am not picking them. I will never be able to get to all of them…”

And then maybe I cry a little bit and drink some more coffee to console myself and make more wedding veils.

See, if I had my way I would be able to pick all the berries in the forest and I would freeze loads of them, and make jam out of loads of them, and invite all of my friends over for smoothies. Then, this winter I would go to my shelves and go to my freezer and eat loads of jam and make smoothies out of frozen fruit and gift my friends with homemade wild blackberry jam made from berries that I not only picked, but canned MYSELF.

That is what I WANT to happen.

I want it to be wild blackberry season all year in my house.
But it won’t be.
It can’t be.
Seasons don’t last that long.

Which brings me to another point. It is finally now getting hot here. Usually by this time I have sweat more than I need to for the whole year and have retreated indoors until nicer weather comes again in September. Nothing is typical this year, however, so it is coming as no surprise that summer is only now settling in.

I told myself this winter I would never complain about the heat again since, remember, winter didn’t end until May here, and it didn’t warm up until June. Never again, I told God, never again would I say, “I can’t handle this heat.”

So I am basking in it. Telling myself to love the humidity.  Soak up the warmth; I know it will be gone again in no time.

Does anybody else feel like that? Feel like summer is already over? How does this happen?

I had my Bible study girlies over all day today. We are taking a break for the rest of the summer and this was our last big hurrah!

We did all typical summer things.
Went on a walk.
Picked berries (obviously).
Ate really good food.
Went traipsing through the woods.
Went “creek stomping,” as they call it.
Cooked food over an open fire.

 All the good summer stuff.

They had leeches on them after this one....grody.

I can't even be in the woods and not make some kind of headpiece.

Dirty the way only summer can make you.

We had to, didn’t we?

I mean, summer comes and goes so fast around here. I can’t take these things for granted.

Like those berries. I can’t take them for granted. So I won’t put up as many as I want to, but this week I am eating my fill of them, reveling in their mad beauty and goodness, thanking God for planting such wild delicacies himself. No one put them there. He just sprang them up, and I benefit immensely. Can you believe that?! What lavish grace. Because giving salvation apparently ISN’T enough to him (it’s enough for ME), he decided to plant me wild black raspberry bushes.

And as I pick all of those berries, and as I sweat with teenage girls romping through a forest, I find myself thinking that all of life is like this. Life, like summer and berry season, goes by so fast. If I don’t pay much attention to it (something I am feeling more and more guilty of the older I get), one day I will blink and then it will be gone.

Berries go bad faster than they come.

I knew these teenage girls as babies not too very long ago.
I was a teenager what seems like less time ago than it actually was.

Life. Seasons. Crazy.

I was at a friend’s baby shower a few weeks ago and something was read about how moms should say “so quiet down, cobwebs; dust, go to sleep, I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.”

I don’t have children, but I have nieces and nephews. Kids who aren’t babies anymore, yet, I feel like yesterday they were babies. It seems they didn’t keep.

I could get all weepy:

Berries don’t keep.
Teenagers don’t keep.
Loved ones don’t keep.
We don’t keep.

But I have a great, sure hope:

Jesus keeps.
And he keeps me.

Praise the Lord.

Because how else in the world am I going to get through any of all of these seasons without being a hot mess unless I cling to him, the Ever Keeping One? There is no good answer.

Fall will come. Winter will even come again, too (please not too soon!), it is hard to believe. And I won’t have as many jars of jam as I wish.

But today, well, today I will pick berries because they are in season, you know. And I will thank him for this season. For this heat and humidity and those teenagers and all the wee crying babies in my life and the all the other things that don’t keep. And I will try not to be frantic thinking about how someday I won’t have berries, but rather, I will praise the name of my God that he decided to plant me a bush in the first place.

Bountiful grace.