priorities

I have these unpredictable little pockets of time when Silas naps. 

The question is always how to spend that time.

Should I fold the laundry mountain?

But what if he wakes up and I only finish half the job and then Beatrix topples all my piles before I can finish…

I think I’ll skip the laundry today.

(ever notice how as a mother it is possible to bring any conversation around to laundry?)

Yesterday during Silas’ evening nap I called my other children and told them, “We are now going to drop what we are doing and we are going to pick raspberries.  If we don’t make it a priority, we’ll miss them.”

We headed out to the raspberry patch.

What? This doesn’t look like a raspberry patch?

You have to look closer.  You actually have to lift the shoots and peek behind and then you will see lots of fat red raspberries.  Too bad these aren’t thornless!  Part of picking our raspberries is getting lots of little thorns in your fingers.  Every year Jonny talks about sinking posts, stretching wire, and transplanting our raspberries and blackberries so that everything is a bit neater, so that our berries are easier to pick.

Every year we have something else going on that takes priority.  This year when Jonny started talking about moving the raspberries my reply was something along the lines of, “How can we spend time fooling with the raspberries when the roof is leaking?”  (as in when it rains really hard we need a bucket to catch the drips upstairs.) “And before we can replace the roof, you need to finish the front porch project.”

And, “Oh my gosh the upstairs windows are totally rotting.”

Living in an old house can totally consume you.

This is the part where we take a deep breath.  We say, “It’s okay.  We’re allright.”

We shift focus and say a thank you for the here and now.

And right now the raspberries are ripe.

The roof will continue to leak, the laundry pile will be with us as long as we are living and breathing.

But the raspberries:  their season is fleeting.

  So we picked.  Well, most of us picked.  A certain small someone mainly played and ate every raspberry she put her little hands on.

(this photo included to show you that Bea recently gave herself a bit of a haircut.  can you see where she cut?  it could have been so. much. worse.  I didn’t have to shed any tears over this little snip.)

We ended up with exactly enough berries for one batch of raspberry preserves (recipe from Canning for a New Generation.)

Late last night, I sat on the couch in our kitchen and nursed my baby while offering moral support to Jonny who can now add making raspberry jam to the list of things he can do.

The raspberry jam on our toast this morning was definitely worth the dishes in the sink, and the laundry all over my bedroom floor.