Sequim, WA where the air smells like lavender

Blueberries for Boys

I was hungry. We had just spent the past hour in a bookstore and after making our selections we headed out in search of a place "like a coffee shop, for muffins and food." We are professional coffee shop people. We found a delicious place a couple of doors down with an excellent lunch menu. It was 1pm and the kids had eaten. Austin had had lunch while I read with Oliver, and Oliver had when I read with Austin and I...hadn't. It's typical for me to forget to eat and then have hunger come roaring into my belly, so, we are professional coffee shop people. This place seemed great, but no muffins or quasi-healthy food was there for the kids, it was either health or triple chocolate cake, and we were on our way out to try lavender ice cream, so we left with my mouth drooling.

We started driving. I was so hungry. Hungry where I couldn't think in logical steps and passed two great looking coffee shops because I could not figure out a way to cross traffic and park. The effort of putting on a blinker too much, and I thought, my god, what will it be like if they go back to school? I'll be able to grab lunch without thinking of everybody around me. My world will expand to 7 hour windows of time rather than the 20 minutes or 2 hours we operate in right now. Almost 8 years of full time parenting has been great, but what will it be like to have space? We ended up at a glamorous Safeway where I chose a bean salad and Oliver got himself some hard boiled eggs.We grabbed some hoagies for our picnic hike in the evening and sat outside at a crumby table.

After dropping the dinner off at home we headed out to the lavender farm and on our way we saw a sign for berry picking. We pulled in to see what that was like. It was nice, so we grabbed a box and hiked out to the orchard getting sprayed by sprinklers along the way. We checked out the black berry bushes where they were just turning to ripe and popped a couple in our mouths. We went down to the short blueberry bushes that looked like they were all picked over and then found the middle height blueberry orchard which was like striking gold. "Mama! I like this! This is fun! I didn't know it would be like this, can we stay for a long time? Like a WHOLE hour?!" Their enthusiasm exploded. I know it probably sounds dramatized to have two boys squealing over blueberry bushes as if we ended up in Disneyland, but that's exactly what it was like and I found myself laughing along in surprise, carried on by their pleasure. We picked and talked and the boys imagined a world where they are farmers, "we would even save on gas money to the grocery store because we'd just be riding around on our horses!" Austin told us about how America was named for "Americo Vespucio, a Portugal merchant who had fumed when Columbus sailed before him. He worked for a nobleman and more people learned of Americo's travels than Columbus', but some people wanted to call the new land "Columbia" and do you know where Portugal is? It is a little peninsula off of Spain but stayed independent." Oliver loved finding the "mother loads" but thought we should call the big bushes of berries the "daddy loads" and kept slipping into a world where we owned a farm house with chickens, lots of blueberry bushes, and a baby goat. When we finally got hot and found ourselves all sitting around the box in the middle of the orchard eating rather than picking, we headed back in and drove to the lavender farm, ice cream well deserved. We sat on a porch and ate our lavender ice cream, sipping our lavender lemonade, and talking about the farming practices of growing flowers and what other plants we all eat. We left happy, and as we climbed back into the truck a note of sadness crept into me and I thought, my god, what will it be like if they go back to school?

Gorgeous farm trees