Summer

It’s been warm — today will be too, the forecast says — but it cools down at night, enough to sleep comfortably when we open windows wide. By mid-morning we’re closing them again, also the curtains, to hold in what the night gave us, and then we wait for evening when we can open again. So it goes, day by day, the small rhythms of summer. Opening and closing. Watering the balcony petunias and geraniums, harvesting the balcony tomatoes, trying to trap fruit flies. The blackberries have started, big and abundant this year, so H and I haunt our sites with our containers. Sunday we took advantage of an invitation to pick apples at a farm, so now we’re making applesauce, and maybe today I’ll make pie-by-the-yard. Our freezer is apartment sized, but I still have this impulse to harvest and store for the winter as if we have a family to feed and a huge freezer to fill! I still “feel” it the way I did as a child and then the mother of school kids, July and August allowing all kinds of difference and flexibility. (As with regular blog posts, for example!) McDonalds has ice cream cones for $1 all summer, so more times than I want to admit, we wander over there mid-afternoon or evening, because it’s a nice walk and the ice-cream is actually very good. (Plus $1 is a deal!) We have company to look forward to in August, most especially our Toronto kids for a week, so my blogging will likely continue in flexible mode. Ah yes, wonderful summer. I don’t mean there aren’t regular matters like H’s frequent (it seems) doctor’s appointments, nor that sadness stops in honour of the season, witness the shootings this weekend, but summer does seem a time for extra gratitude.

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