This afternoon, a cool breeze, rain. Birds.

Downstairs, me and my 13-year-old — my younger daughter is in her room, sleeping maybe? —
and a 90-minute podcast on success.

“How do you define success?” I ask, hitting pause.
“Doing something correctly?” he asks back.

He grips a pencil and my chest puffs. My little notetaker!
But when I look closely I see
he’s only tallying
the number of times the presenters say
“um.”

I make margarita mix.

Also, brown rice, with bacon grease, in the rice cooker.
Beef browning, with onions, garlic, and pepper,
and taco seasoning added at the end.
Brownies.

My older daughter texts that she and her brother, at Culebra, are heading out to snorkel.
Text when you get back, I tell her.
They had fun, she reports later,
but there wasn’t much to see.

“Books are the great lie that tell the truth about the way the world lives,” Verghese quotes.
“Don’t prepare the path for myself,” someone else quips. “Prepare myself for the path.”

I plan the menu for the next few days and add to my grocery list
scallions, salmon, evaporated milk.
When the kids come home (tomorrow!), we might have strawberry shortcake.
If there are still berries in the garden.
My younger son washes the dishes.

Distracted, he picks up my camera and
wanders, snapping aimlessly, until I tell him to
stop.

The podcast ends and he disappears,
probably to his room to read.

Outside it’s still raining (but barely) and
in the kitchen it’s quiet. Just me,
a grown-up.

This same time, years previous: energy boost, the family reunion of 2017, the quotidian (6.6.16), delivery, meat market: life in the raw, of a sun-filled evening, for hot summer days, three reds fruit crumble.

Strawberries were bonkers this year. We harvested so many that they could probably be counted in bushels, I kid you not (and then my parents off-loaded a few bowls of berries from their patch, too). I’ve spent hours at the kitchen sink, topping and slicing berries until my fingers shriveled. A couple different times, guests showed up on a berry day and we put them all to work — which made my job infinitely easier (and makes me think I should always have company over on berry days).

Now I have over fifty quarts of sliced, sugared berries in the freezer, plus another ten or so quarts of frozen whole berries for smoothies and several batches of jam. In fact, we have so many berries in the freezer that we plugged in our smallest little freezer and then filled it to the brim. In other words, we have an entire freezer dedicated to strawberries, o the wealth!

And that’s not counting all the berries we ate fresh, in strawberry cream pies, strawberry rhubarb pies, fruit smoothies, berries on ice cream, berries on granola, strawberry shortcake.

I made a double batch of the shortcake for our supper on Memorial Day when my husband’s sister’s family came for the night. Along with the enormous bowl of berries (that they all helped to top and slice, of course), there was whipped cream. I had some of shortcake with whipped cream, but then I tried some with milk, which I actually preferred. With milk, the cake and berries felt more substantial, more slurpily delicious.

I made another shortcake a few nights ago. We devoured it, again — there’s something deliciously quaint and wholesome about an entire dinner consisting of berries, cake, and milk — and it got me wondering: why do I ever bother with biscuit shortcake? A sheetcake is so much easier than individually dolloped biscuits, and the leftovers hold up better, too.

Now, off to the kitchen where a big bowl of — you guessed it! — strawberries is waiting to be turned into something or other.

This same time, years previous: the quotidian (6.4.18), a better grilled cheese sandwich, on pins and needles, the quotidian (6.3.13), the best chocolate ice cream ever.

This same time, years previous: mama said, this is us, brown sugar rhubarb muffins, the quotidian (6.1.15), the quotidian (6.2.14), small pasta with spinach and bacon.