The very tiny berries

“This summer is kind of a bust,” I said to my husband this morning. I was limping around our kitchen on my very arthritic knee that has deteriorated over the past month until some days I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to get up off our couch again.

“Eh.” My husband shrugged.

I glanced at the summer fun to-do list I’d made back in the spring. Only one of the items is crossed off and I’m not sure we’ll get to any of them given the current state of my knee. Or the weather.

Outside, we’re in day three or four of a heat wave that will bring unprecedentedly warm temperatures all across the country. Every day I get up and look at the ten-day forecast, waiting for a break in the heat to appear. Every day, I’m disappointed.

All the plants in my garden look very sad. I try to keep up with watering them, but with the heat and lack of rain, I’m fighting a losing battle. On the very worst days, I sit outside, sweating but trying to get out of the air conditioning for just a few moments and my mind wanders to things like species extinction and power grid collapse and food shortages.

The library’s courier system for getting holds has come to a standstill yet again, through no fault of my local librarians but yet another attempt to cut costs or increase efficiency or some bureaucratic idiocy whose end result is that none of my books show up. This matters less given than I can’t walk to the library, one of my greatest pleasures, because of my bum knee.

I could go on. One of our cats has taken to compulsively licking her back and now has two growing patches of bare skin. The other cat has her own bum leg, which may soon prevent her from being able to reach the litter box in the basement. I’m writing every day, that’s true, but the writing doesn’t seem to add up to much. Nothing ever gets finished. I often find myself stuck, not sure what to say next.

None of this includes the feeling that hovers over us all in this election year, that doom is coming, one way or another. We are all collectively holding our breaths.

After my proclamation about the state of our summer this morning, my husband wrapped me in a hug. We do this over and over again throughout the day. I walk into his office where he’s working and ask for a hug. We stop what we’re doing in the kitchen and step into each other’s arms. To have that affection on-call at any moment of the day is one of the greatest blessings of my life, one of those things I never knew how much I needed until it was there.

Later, I’m sitting on the couch with an essay I’ve printed out, editing it with a pencil. The bagels we made are in the oven. I can still hobble around the kitchen enough to do that, at least. We make the bagels together, my husband sprinkling the everything toppings on when they come out of the malt barley bath. It’s one of my favorite things we do together, the conversations we have as the bagels are floating in the water, waiting to be turned. And tomorrow morning, there will be bagels for breakfast.

The essay I’m editing makes a strange transition and I can no longer follow exactly where I was going. It’s not there yet, but there’s something very satisfying about making the small changes. Taking a word out here and adding one there. Sometimes the pleasure of this simple activity fills me up and bubbles over until I can barely sit still. This is the other physical part of writing—making yourself sit still when the antsy joy of what you’re doing flows through you.

When I went outside in the evening heat yesterday, two mourning doves were on the power line, singing their low, sad song. The cardinal hopped along the line. The song sparrow landed in the grass. The lilies are blooming. My husband came inside with three sun gold cherry tomatoes that had still ripened on the heat-stressed plant—one for me and two for his salad.

Tomorrow I’ll go to lunch with a friend. We might go to a bookstore and buy some books. Each night, the fireflies will still come out of the grass when the sun at last goes down. The Reds might win. They might even make it into the post-season. Anything is possible.

In the morning, I summon the energy to pick the tiny, tiny raspberries that grow on the bush under the nectarine tree. The bush gets choked with weeds and vines which I do my best to beat back. Every year, I forget to cut back the canes or if I’m supposed to cut back the canes or when or which ones. It is not a robust plant and so each morning the berries seem to be smaller and smaller. On the best days, there are only a dozen total. I eat half and leave half on the counter for my husband.

The berries are so tiny, but they taste so sweet.