blueberry picking

 The last time I went, I was pregnant with Maya.  I always have strawberry picking on my list of things to do for the summer, but then the great summer machine begins to whir and we never end up making it.  I wish I could say things have quieted, but they haven't--we're still just as inundated as ever, but I'm trying to shuffle priorities and put this one first:  family.

 Not that family wasn't first before--I shouldn't imply it is otherwise.  But I'd gotten swept up in launching a literary journal, having a huge spurt of poetry-writing followed by a sequence of personal essays, and I was reading and reading and working towards my Ph.D application and writing reviews and... and...

Not really taking a breath.  It's how I operate, and I don't know if I actively want to change that so much as learn to live with my rhythm as best I can.  I feel it's difficult to just hold on sometimes.  I get terrified when I lose the desire to write, which is really not it going away so much as it's dormant.  This dormancy is an opportunity, and I am trying to embrace that.

This all means what I'm doing now is trying to look around.  Consequently, it's filling up that mythical creative well, and perhaps in six months I'll have a spate of poems about blueberry picking.  Perhaps not.  It's frightening when you can't control some of the things you are the most passionate about.  Last late winter, I couldn't get myself to work on knitting consistently to save my life.  I simply wasn't in the mood.  What does that even mean?  I flounder.  I miss what I don't have, afraid it won't come back.

What I do have is this:  me, in a field, with the three people I love the most in the world, and we're harvesting, and my daughter is devouring just as many blueberries as she is picking, and we are filling our buckets.  It's hot and my son is running up and down, yelling at the butterflies:  "Yah, yah, yah, yah!"  My husband is trying to find the sweetest berry for me; most of them are so tart I make a face.  Perfect for baking.  My daughter doesn't mind.  I decide to follow her lead.