It’s the time of year when fruit flies are destined to take over the universe—or at least your kitchen. It’s the time of year when you keep cooking and canning and freezing trying to stay ahead of those fruit flies. It’s the time of year when your compost bucket fills up every day, more than once.
It’s the time of year when long green veggies pile up in your kitchen. You Google “zucchini recipes” and that poem by Marge Piercy. You’re not handing them out to anybody who walks by. Not quite yet.
It’s the time of year when peach juice drips down your chin and blueberries stain your fingers purple. Your arms are crisscrossed with scratches from raspberry brambles, but you don’t care.
It’s the time of year when lawn mowers rumble through dinner time and the evening insects are quieter as darkness settles. It’s the time of year when you should be cursing the heat and humidity, but tonight it feels like fall. Not yet. Not yet.
It’s the time of year when you want to sit outside and do nothing, but the garden calls and the squash and the beans and the cucumbers on the counter call. It’s the time of year when you stir pots in steamy kitchens (and love it) and wait for that tiny ping that makes you smile each time.
It’s the time of year when years ago you were waiting for your baby’s surgery, waiting to start the life you expected (almost), and you wonder now if that old anxiety is in you still. You know it’s there still in December, but in July, when you were scared but still hopeful? You don’t know. So you do what you did that year. You chop the summer fruit and cook it down and put it in jars. You did it that year because you needed something “normal” to hold on to. You do it now because it’s that time of year.
Your Turn
Write with Me:
It’s the time of year when . . . How does that sentence end for you? What are the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of this time of year? What’s happening in this season, in your life right now? Let it be loose and rough, but keep writing and see what comes up.
Share It:
Share your writing in the comments, add a link to your blog where you write about this time of year, or email me at sarabarrywrites@gmail.com. I’d love to hear this time of year is like for you.
It’s that time of year when everything stops at home. Or tries to stop. We escape our island solitude for cousins, music and thoughtful conversations.
We drive hours and stop then drive more hours and stop. Cracker Barrel sees more of me than I would like, but the stores are fun and the food consistent and mostly healthful.
Where to go next? Maybe visit that cousin… that national park… sneak into the community pool near the rabbits… make a basket… see an ancient mound demarcating a culture which died out before white man came… a fast run to another state (3, 2, 1, Ohio – 3, 2, 1, West Virginia – 3, 2, 1 New Mexico) and a hotel to catch a few hours rest.
It’s that time of year when I wonder why I planted a garden this year. The tomatoes are ripe and someone else is picking them. Hoping the zucchini will be there when I get home not eaten by the rabbits. Knowing the beans will be too large to eat without plucking from their pods – seeds for next year.
It’s that time of year when I am glad to be away, knowing the kids will grow too fast and want to stay home with their friends rather than travel with me, knowing the family I visit won’t be there to visit forever, knowing distances grow and get smaller as time passes by the windows of my soul.
Opened a file called Wed writing with Sara. Here it is:
It’s that time of year when I don’t want to look at the calendar. I don’t want to face that it’s almost August. I don’t want to face that cooler nights are coming. I don’t want to face that the days will melt into each other as I scramble to fold every dream I held for summer in the four remaining weeks.
But tonight, I inhale the hot, heavy air. I sit outside past bedtime, reading thanks to my backlit kobo. I am reading In My Own Heart’s Blood, the latest in Diana Gabeldon’s Outlander series. Fittingly, the characters are parched with thirst, baking amid a battle and drenched in sweat from the scorching sun. I snuggle into my lounge chair, cooled somewhat by my wet bathing suit, delaying my inevitable ascent into my bedroom, starved for a breeze.
I scan the sky looking for storm clouds half hoping for a thunderstorm to push out the heat. I coach myself to live in the moment, the heat of the moment and try to capture these sensations, to trap them like fireflies, so I can pull them out when winter comes.
I loved reading both of these and feel the pressure of time in both of them. Thanks for sharing. (Now off to catch up on some of our summer “want to do” things.)
What a fun idea! Mine is on my blog: http://theadventuresofteamdanger.blogspot.com/2014/07/write-with-me-wednesday-it-time-of-year.html