I arrived at my brother’s house a week ago. Since then, I have picked a great many blueberries. Nowhere close to picking them all, though! We could easily spend three or four times as long and still come nowhere close. The blueberries are prolific this year. Also delicious. Even some of the bushes I haven’t liked in past years — too bland or too small — are good this summer. Maybe it’s because of all the rain? And my favorite bush, which in years past has only had scattered handfuls of berries, has hundreds of them this year. It’s blueberry heaven.

Every time we go pick, though, usually reasonably early in the morning, I both enjoy myself and am incredibly thankful that my life doesn’t actually require me to pick berries for a living. It’s a peaceful, pleasantly monotonous chore for about twenty minutes. And then I start to get hot and sweaty and the mosquitoes begin to attack or I put my knee down on a thistle or my hand into a spiderweb and I’m really grateful that I can stop whenever I want to. We walk away with our full tubs of berries and leave plenty on the bushes for the birds or for the next day’s picking.

Ironically, I woke up this morning with stiff neck and shoulder muscles that had nothing to do with berries. I’ve been spending a lot of time on my computer: working on a marketing plan, a mailing list strategy, some website updates, edits to A Lonely Magic, and words on its sequel. The last has been the least successful of those endeavors, but I spent hours on my laptop yesterday, trying to get back into the swing of it.

Along the way, I updated the Scribbles page with a couple of my favorite fanfiction stories, some unfinished stories that I like, and a scene that I cut from A Gift of Time long ago. It felt like a very productive day at the time, but this morning it felt like I’d been doing heavy labor. But having real internet feels like such a luxury — I want to take advantage of it while I can. One of the unfinished stories is so tempting, too — it’s always the way of the words: the story I’m writing feels like work, the story I’m not writing feels like temptation. (I was going to tell you which one, but I will wait and see if anyone wants to guess first. 🙂 )

And speaking of temptation, I think it’s time for lunch. Breakfast this morning was yogurt, blueberries, and granola. I think lunch is going to be a spinach salad with goat cheese, blueberries, and pumpkin seeds. Dinner will probably include some blueberries, too, in one form or another. Yay for summertime!