I was just out with the dog----at 5:30 AM, for some reason his preferred time to go out in the AM----and had put a pot of coffee on first, so it was waiting for me in the house, when I discovered that the wild raspberries behind my barn were at their absolute peak. So I feasted on raspberries while Alfie puttered around.
Blueberries are not yet ripe, and I am going to be off on a trip next week, until July 27th. So maybe my housesitters will get the benefit of the blueberries. But a raspberry breakfast was lovely.
Back here at my desk, re-reading a half-finished book manuscript, I have just made a note to myself: Introduce Harvey and Augustus sooner. Yesterday, while working on this book, these two characters suddenly appeared out of nowhere, with particular personalities that I like (one whines, one pontificates)...so there they are. But I realize that they were always there, and now I have to go back and introduce them sooner, instead of having them pop up unexpectedly.
A computer, of course, makes this so easy. Sometimes I think back to the days when I wrote on a tyepwriter, and revision of any sort---introducing characters earlier, for example---meant re-typing a zillion pages, not a happy task.
Speaking of new characters, my daughter in San Francisco has just (or maybe it wasn't JUST, but I just noticed it) put a high school photo of herself , probably 15 years old, on her Facebook album. Here it is:
And looking at it transports me right back in time. Her siblings would have been 14, 12, and 11, then. I was always either in the kitchen, or in my darkroom---I was doing a lot of photography then---or at my little electric typewriter, at a little table, in a corner of a sort of den, in our house. I was in graduate school, always writing some paper or other (I remember one I loved doing, which compared the work of Virginia Woolf to photography at that time, and how it was changing, as writing was---I remember writing about the shifting focus and different lenses used in "To the Lighthouse").
She was a serious scholar, too; and it was probably the summer she was 15 that she enrolled in some courses at the same nearby university where I was studying. She took German, and began translating Rilke.
My kids were all very interesting, each of them in different ways. I don't think I was too busy to appreciate that at the time. But I certainly was busy.
Now I wander around picking raspberries.
This post tugged at my heart. My children are 15 and 11. My daughter (15) just flew to U of I to track camp...without me. My days are numbered before they leave home and begin their own journey. Instead of raspberries, I'll be picking avocados. Too bad you'll miss the blueberries. I have my grandmother's bluberry buckle recipe that's guaranteed to add five pounds in two days! Delicious!
Posted by: Krista | July 11, 2009 at 08:06 AM
It was a lousy blueberry season in 2007, said Siv Wiik, 70, one of a pair of Swedish grandmothers now credited with discovering what experts say may be one of the richest gold deposits in Europe. “That year it was too cold in the spring, so there were few berries,” she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/world/europe/13sweden.html?_r=1
Posted by: ojimenez | July 13, 2009 at 11:31 AM