(Credit goes to the "Iris Folding" website at http://www.irisfolding.circleofcrafters.com/ for the photo. This is a technique of folding paper to make cards and pictures, that I discovered along with this photograph. Crafters in the audience, check it out!)
Time passes for everyone for different reasons -- busy-ness, healing, lack of noticing, noticing as hard as one can -- but it still passes. Here we are heading into late July, the year more than half gone by, our lives ticking along as if they didn't know we wanted to stop and reflect just a bit more. So whether you prefer "F" to stand for "fiddlesticks," "fudge," or something a little stronger, we can all say a collective: "WTF !?!?"
However, since no amount of rambling will make time go any slower, I'll move on. This is also because it's truly summer now: we're even getting hot weather in Cape Breton, imagine that! At least, when it's not raining, that is.
Hot weather = less energy to write or read long tracts, and it also = more outdoor, fun stuff to do. Therefore I'm going to prove that that I can be brief and concise, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and save us all some energy in these days of hot, hot heat.
It's strawberry season here -- everything's a little late this year -- and the other night Mum got a flat (12 baskets) from Hank's Farm in Millville. We sat down in the living room with the baskets, bowls and knives, in front of a movie, our yearly tradition. (This year the film was Pedro Almodovar's Volver.) We chop the stems off, then chop each berry into a few pieces, quickly filling a big bowl with glistening, ruby-red fruit. We then freeze the pieces in small bags, ensuring a strawberry supply all winter long.
As I worked, my fingers turned an incriminating crimson, which matched the film perfectly: Volver is set in La Mancha and Madrid, and the screen is lush with beautiful food, houses, and dark-haired women, and everywhere the color red in clothes, cars, red peppers, and so on. The scarlet berries we chopped were so ripe that when we ate the odd one (or ten), it seemed to disintegrate on the tongue with barely any pressure, the water and sugar of the berry in a precise, sweet balance. Who says there's no such thing as perfection?
I hope you're able to taste good, ripe, locally-grown fruits and veggies, wherever you are this summer. Nothing makes time slow down, but these come awfully close.
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