Bounty

We split up after Mass this evening: Elwood picked up Alex at his friend's apartment, and the CSA veggies from their drop-off site, while the kids and I dashed home and pulled our picnic fixings out of the fridge. I'd made a pan bagnat with tuna and another with egg, and I sliced up a couple of melons to go alongside. We all met at a park near our house.

I've been taking my kids to that park since we moved here in 2005: first 3, then 4, then 5 of them. I watched the kids playing a variant of structure tag tonight and remembered the day in 2008 that 6yo Joe coaxed his hugely pregnant mom into playing. (It ended badly, with a symphysis injury that laid me up for a week and didn't really resolve for the rest of the pregnancy.) I remembered the year I took our Christmas picture with the boys atop the climbing rock. "It's so much shorter than I remembered," said one of them. We reminisced about the boy who declared himself King of the Underworld, asserting that the secret entrance to his kingdom lay under that rock.

I was feeling teary as I watched them play together. School starts tomorrow for the two youngest kids, and new school years always leave me feeling a little wistful. Joe leaves for boarding school on Thursday, and Alex goes back to college this weekend. A year from now all three of the big kids will be gone.

I made them take an awkward picture before they ran off to play "you got melted by the wood-chip lava NO HAHA **YOU** GOT MELTED." Perhaps I should shed a tear in memory of their melted extremities too.

I went back to the car and discovered pounds and pounds of CSA produce: I knew we were getting a half-bushel of apples, but I had forgotten how very many apples that actually is. I didn't know that this was the week of the thank-you edamame, but there they were in the trunk too: 9 pounds of them.

It's the time of year here when the farmland is overflowing with goodness-- our portion was too much for me to carry. Here on this feast day I am thinking about all I have been given-- my home, too, is overflowing with good gifts. And I am trying to tend them carefully, and preparing to send them out into the world.