RIPE

I take the lawn tractor on a detour from its regularly scheduled circlings of the property to keep my son from succumbing to the near-fatal density of his desire entirely. I bring the ancient thing to a lurching stop for a moment underneath the mulberry tree to let my kid grab the two berries that are ripe now.

In this moment, we have officially harvested all that’s ready, but tomorrow the tree will hurl 3.4 tons of mulberries at our heads, causing everyone, including the groundhog who is making lace of the strata under the shed, to turn a semi-permanent magenta color from now until mid-August.

Normally I’m fairly crotchety, a “don’t let them fool you, they’ll just ask you to get up off the couch and do something for them” kind of assessor of humanity. But midsummer and its thrusting, greening chaos, the fecund drape of fruit-bearing plants in the heaviness of humidity— these, they got me all OK ***FINE*** I LOVE YOU.

Whereas midwinter beats me down with darkness and its terrible isolation, bringing me into a need for staring, mesmerized community with the woodstove and the sound of the howling void, midsummer makes me think there might be a way to be in the world that doesn’t involve double-fisting alone by the cheetos at every party. As in: I look around, and there are, like bright fruits, people.

Sure, there is the necessary hurdle of the biting resentment I feel when I see other people at the berry patch, where my need to find and pick every berry allotted to this planet becomes sufficiently strong to make my elbows twitch with fantasies about contact with competing jawlines. But other than that, in the greening heat of the world, I begin to think something like Ah, we won’t be here forever. Look at this plenty! Now’s the time.

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What if restraint is for suckers?