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Summer's passed her mid-way point.
July has rounded the bend in languished heat into August.
It's dark and I'm crying a little bit.
Something about the pace of my life leaves me just short of reaching my goals, out of breath and a bit bewildered, as if I'm riding a spinning carousel and trying to find something, anything to focus on for more than a second or two.
I don't have lofty goals, really. But some days every single thing I begin is left undone by setting sun.
But that's not really why I'm crying.
I've left raspberries on the vine. Unpicked. Unpickable. They are hanging, clinging, drying remains of the berries they must have been last week, or the week before that. I was simply too busy to notice.
I set about this evening to pluck whatever juicy berries remained. Dusk came closing in and I stood in the back corner of my yard, surrounded by nearly wild raspberry canes and weeds four feet tall. And there I cried.
The first few years that I had gardened, we, my oldest daughter (then age 5) checked the raspberries throughout July to see if they were ready. She insisted on tasting the first red berry, not waiting for it to really ripen. It wasn't sweet; in fact not-quite-ready-raspberries can be shockingly tart. We had time to watch the berries ripen. Now, my oldest daughter (age 15) is at a concert that she went to after she was done at work, and I'm wondering how fast does time fly, really.
At the speed of light, I believe.
Because it was just a flicker of light ago that she was little girl and we had time to actually be in the garden, tend it, participate in it.
A flicker of light ago I moved to my new house and brought much of my garden with me, including my raspberries.
A flicker of light ago we brought home daughter no.2 from the hospital. That was the spring after 9/11. The spring following a harrowing winter of financial fear, of nearly losing our home, of weeks of dry-walling the basement to make more bedrooms for our growing family.
A flicker of light ago.
A flicker of light ago and the time is flying. My babies are growing, my house isn't new anymore, the raspberries are left to dry on the vine, and all I can do is enjoy my babies, love living in my house and hope I do better in the garden next year.
And I can embrace the truth in the words my aunt penned in her notebook:
Comedy merges into tragedy and smiles put rainbows in our tears.
and,
The whole perspective changes with the shifted position of the eye and depends not on the subject, but on the man who is looking. (Irving Stone)
Sure, my life is busy. But there are worse things to leave undone than unpicked raspberries. Oh, I don't want to miss out on those.
I want to pluck the juicy, beautiful fruit of life and taste it right there in the garden. I want to relish the sweetness of it:
of a life of loving others well;
of giving and receiving;
of learning to take the steps of faith that change me;
of choosing to serve and forgive and forgive some more;
of understanding that I can make mistakes and I can make them right;
of knowing the garden of life is tended by a Gardener that isn't held captive by seasons, and in his garden, the fruit ripens at the right time.
I can remember to shift my position and allow my whole perspective to change, because that doesn't take any time at all -- it just takes a willingness to look at things differently.
Because while my raspberries were over-ripening and withering, I was busy living the life set in front of me to live. So what if it's moving at the speed of light -- light always has a rainbow in it. I just have to look for it.
