Raspberries & Haze

Help! We are flooded with raspberries. Please come and pick yourself a bucketful. Delicious, nutritious, good for heart and soul–what’s not to love? If you are in a wheelchair, the bushes border an accessible trail, so no excuses. Just let me know when you want to drop by, so I can get you situated. $5/little basket. $8/big basket.

In other news, the sky is once again blue. Hallelujah! The last few days were all smoke and haze, the air heavy, rank and depressing. We were literally breathing in particles of plants and animals burned in the Canadian wildfires. The heavens looked angry:

After taking this picture, I drove down to the city to see my daughter and have lunch with a friend, at once grateful for our Toyota’s filtration system and aware that pressing the accelerator, adjusting the AC, even listening to an audiobook beamed to me via satellite (Ann Patchett’s lovely Whistler) was contributing to global warming. And global warming was and is contributing to the increasing intensity and frequency of wildfires.1

Years ago, when the kids were young, we were driving to Long Island for a seder and got entangled in a bumper-to-bumper tie up on the LIE. The usual sighs and protests about the traffic followed. Then Happy, who was small enough to be strapped into a child seat, mused: “But we are the traffic.”

Yes, Happy, we are the traffic. It’s become a family adage.

Another time, even earlier, when Happy was maybe three, when his voice was baby soft, when language was new and each string of words an occasion for amazement, we were driving in Brooklyn and stopped at a light on Dekalb. All was quiet. Then Happy began to sing.2

The problem
The problem
The problem
Of the air

He kept singing the same haunted verse, over and over, tentative at first, then with more confidence. Jason and l listened, confused and entranced. What was this song? Where had Happy learned it? Nowhere, it turned out. It had just come to him in the quiet lull of a backseat ride.

The problem with the air. We are the traffic. No insight of mine outshines the clarity of these phrases. I offer no solutions either–simply a bow to the brilliance of children.