Blackberries!

So I was mowing the lawn, like you do, because my mother said I had to and also it looked and still looks like it's going to rain this afternoon, which meant I couldn't put it off much. It was cool enough that I didn't have to change into shorts, but I didn't want to sweat through my shirt if I could possibly help it, so I took it off, and stuck with just a sports bra - not my usual, but nice our house is surrounded by trees, nobody could see me and it really was pretty muggy, if not all that hot. And I was listening to music, which meant I ended up doing a kind of hybrid dancing-mowing-mouthing-the-words thing; very dorky, and always cause for me to be glad that most of the time nobody else is home when I mow the lawn.

Another thing on my list of tasks was to trim the kiwi - possibly I have mentioned this, I don't know, but we have a kiwi ... bush? IDEK, that started out as just a little thing next to the south side of the porch, and has now grown into an enormous monster that covers the entirety of the porch railing on the south and east sides, and has only been prevented from swallowing the north end of the porch, too, by some aggressive pruning. (There's another one across the lawn from the first that grew up the fence and ate it; it gets far less trimming, so it's sort of a mass of greenery with great long tendrils winding out into the air, searching for something else to strangle. I like to call that one Cthulhu.)

Anyway, I was taking the kiwi bits down to the compost, still with the music on, and that was ( when I noticed some blackberries that were pretty much ripe. Less a story than an attempt to preserve a set of moments in my memory. )

Then I climbed up the slope around the side of the patch and onto the driveway proper, and picked a few last handfuls, and then carried the cat and a bowl full of blackberries back up to the house, with my feet coming down on the beat and Regina Spektor in my ears.

So. Today has pretty much managed to get itself categorized as a good day.