"Go Outside and Play!"

Beloved:

One family rode their bikes to church on Sunday.  Their kids’ heads smelled like sunshine when I hugged them.  I’ve got tiny tomatoes on the vine.  I picked a batch of basil and stirred it into a salad.  My whole kitchen smelled like summertime.  Southern Indiana is so beautiful in June, sometimes it hurts my eyes.

I think it such a precious thing to be living now in the same place I was a child.  Alone in my yard I sometimes fall out of time and am not sure if I’m eight years old or fifty-three.  Not because I’m senile (yet!) but because the air and light and scent are acutely familiar.  My eight-year-old self  didn’t know she loved being by herself outside:  reading a book, swinging, doing nothing.  I didn’t know I was happy.  I was just a kid whose mom said, “Go outside and play!” – to which I never once answered, Thank you for this most perfect gift.

I’ll thank her every June, July and August morning left to me.  Picking berries and carrying weeds to the ditch.  Dragging water hoses and loading the birdfeeders.  Plucking off the tomato worms and filling up the egg basket.  Knowing it was always her idea, that I go out and play.  And a gift from heaven, I suppose, to move away, then end up back here after all.
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I like thinking about how all over the world, in places as different as can be from here, people are just as much at home as I am here among these green hills, below this blue sky, where crickets and frogs sing each other to sleep as I write.  Wherever home is for you – a place or a person or maybe a memory – I pray you have a moment there sometime soon.  

These are a few pics from my playground these last few days.
1.) Chicken wearing a hydrangea bonnet  
2.) Annabelle hydrangea in peak bloom ~ same as on the Communion table this past Sunday
3.) Lungwort and lemon balm taking over
4.) Yellow squash plants
5.) Licorice Anise smells amazing!