Picking Blueberries On A Fine Summer DayI

Photo By Mitchell On His Go Pro

7:15

I actually slept in, till 6:40, a seeming miracle, and came down to an empty coffee pot.  So I made the coffee, went outside to take a photo of the morning, nothing exciting, and came in to relax with my computer.  It's 61º out, a partly cloudy sky, with a chance of precipitation late in the day.  The martins are busy, noisy, taking care of their babies, and a heron, gangly and huge, just alighted with amazing skill on a dock, a miracle of nature.  And a paddle boarder just skimmed by, a guy in a life jacket, hat, and shorts, not something we usually see this early.  He makes it seem easy, perhaps it is.

Yesterday was the perfect day on the lake, sunny, blue skies, a whiff of a wind, warm enough to be in a bathing suit, but not so warm that you had to come in and get out of the sun.  The girls slept in till 9:00, which they need, having had a busy Wednesday.  It was so nice early that I took a long kayak paddle, the lake smooth and blue, over to Long Point, to Wells Bay and back meeting our neighbors who were also out for a paddle.  The lake remains surprisingly quiet for a beautiful July morning but I am not complaining.  They will come.  

Ready For Blueberries

Halle Loves Her Granny

The Girls With A Blue Bucket

Around 10:30, we rounded the girls up and took them off to the blueberry farm we always visit, about ten minutes away.  In fact, Evie's photo album cover for this past summer, was taken picking blueberries. The fields opened less than a week ago so the peak is a week or two off, yet we found lots of large, lush berries.  We were greeted with hugs by Margaret and her husband, who we have come to know over the years.  There were two or three cars there when we arrived, about ten when we left, and one driven by our neighbors daughter, so Woodlawn was well represented.  The girls did not seem as in to picking berries this year, so we stayed for forty five minutes max, but walked away with eight pounds.  

Silliness Personified

When we got home, Beth went shopping, picking up some things we needed for dinner and Mitch and Hayden went to Turner's, to work out.  Good kids.  The rest of us hung out on the dock, swimming and enjoying the day, the girls once again making up games, practicing their dives, jumping on the floats.  And that's how our day went, enjoying the water for an hour, coming inside to get something to eat or relax with a book or iPad, then back out to enjoy the sun.  We went tubing around 3:30, my boat still not up to snuff though the girls loved it.  As I mentioned, the boat seems to have no guts, goes slow.  Well, I decided to wash the hull and found the bottom filled with tiny shells of some sort, not algae but like little grains of sand.  I worked on getting them off, sometimes submerging myself under the hull.  And guess what, the boat ran normally, so all the angst about the engine really wasn't the engine, but the hull's surface which slowed us down.  What a relief.

Beth's Art Class

The Whole Gang

Around 4:00, Beth got out the paints because the girls seemed bored with swimming, and we all sat in the shade, on the picnic table, painting rocks, a perfect way to end the afternoon.  The kids are amazingly creative whereas I had no inspiration, embarrassed by my efforts at rock art.  We spent a good hour and a half, our neighbors, the Leonards stopping over, to admire our work.  Because the boat was fixed, or rather clean, the girls wanted to tube again, so around 6:30, we went out for another bout of tubing, the girls loving it when I went in circles, forcing them to jump over waves, close to but not falling out.  It was great fun just watching them scream and laugh.  

Rock Art

When we got in, the spaghetti dinner was already on the plates, so the girls hustled out of their suits, threw all the wet stuff down by the dryer, and sat down to eat a tasty spaghetti and meatball dinner, with a great Evie salad and Beth's garlic bread.  Everyone was starved yet we have quite a  bit leftover for lunches.  We did not finish eating until around 8:00, so we decided to watch a movie we had saved from HBO called Parenthood, which we thought would be a good family movie.  Wrong! The plot was familial, about a father's angst over his introverted son's unhappiness, but in between the plot lines were some fairly vulgar intimations, not something for your grandchildren.  We never learn, thinking back on a movie, not realizing that there are parts which make it more than PG rated.

Baba Gets A Make Over

The movie ended after 10:00 but no one stayed to see the end.  So we ended the day around 10:30, happy with the cool night air, ready for a good sleep.