Doctrine and Covenants 104:17
When I told my mother my plan to become an English professor, she laughed and said, "Prepare for a life of poverty." My father was a professor when I was growing up, and no doubt part of my decision to become a teacher sprang from a desire to emulate him, but I took my mother's advice to heart and tried to cultivate inexpensive tastes. After a brief (two-year) stint in a grad program and an even briefer (one-year) stint teaching 9th- and 11th-grade English, I ultimately found my calling in the law and joined a professional class where conspicuous consumption is the norm. As I slowly ascend the professional ladder, I want to occasionally remind myself that, as a young man, I was willing to be poor and happy.
Say that small pleasures are the best pleasures, or say that God is in the details, it's always been true in my book. This morning the kids were playing in the yard behind our apartment and noticed that the thorny bushes bordering the grass were dotted with raspberries. What started as an aimless morning became a magic hour of berry-picking, carefully peeling back prickly leaves and branches to pluck handful after handful of soft, red raspberries whose sole purpose was to ripen in the sun and present themselves for our diligent hands. The five of us were totally engrossed, moving from bush to bush, weaving and bobbing our heads looking for the next undiscovered cluster.
So went the morning, and so went the day. A friend invited me to go bike riding along the Brandywine, and for another hour my body was immersed in the bright colors and grateful sweat of summer. I came home, read two chapters of Charlotte's Web with the kids, took a nap, and passed the remainder of the afternoon in the pool.
While K. made a homemade pizza for dinner, Sage and I made a custard tart to go with our raspberries. Tomorrow we'll eat it for breakfast. I'm thirty-one years old and scraping by on a government salary, but in the meantime here's a five-year old girl holding raspberries in a yellow bowl. Tell me that wouldn't make you happy.
5 comments:
I love this post. Raspberries just make me happy. They remind me of my grandfather who always had them in his garden. I have picked some just about every year for as long as I can remember. What a secret you all found out! Hope you enjoyed that tart (and breakfast is the best time to eat a tart)
Beautiful. Can't wait to hear about your next adventure...delivery #4! Good luck and "God speed!"
Thanks for the well-wishing, guys! I think raspberries are an inherently happpy thing--a gift of color, taste, and texture.
In other news, K.'s due date is supposedly tomorrow, but early signs have had us waiting around for two weeks. Let's get the show on the road, kiddo.
"God is in the details"; I've never heard that before, but I like it. I wish our society took more time to smell the roses and appreciate life's simpler pleasures. Based solely on my outside experience as an uncle, I would say that children help, perhaps even force, us grizzled "old" people to appreciate the simple beauties of life. As child-bearing becomes less and less popular in society, I worry that beauty and zest for life will likewise become quaint, outmoded relics.
they were good!
sage
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