Days/tea

Well, it's been days since my last post, and honestly I have no excuse for being so neglectful. I have spent the past three days working, but am home at night and in the morning. However, most of that time is spent rushing to beat the band...getting ready for the day, making lunches, packing swimming gear and/or extra clothes, and then when we come home, making dinner and unpacking the days storm of gear. (dirty cloth diapers and wipes, wet bathing suits, towels, and lunch bags.) I can't make the claim that this time of year is any more exhausting then any other- it just seems busier.

Unless you put into account that my gardens need desperate weeding, lettuce and greens need to be picked daily so they don't bolt, and tomatoes are threatening to lean so far over the kale that it's invisible.  So unlike my friends who are farmers, my life in an agricultural sense is relatively easy. There are days that sort of bums me out...I spent a part of my late teens and twenties loving the soil with such a passion I was sure that here, ten years later, I would be living my life more a part of it.  I had this deep love and affection for growing things and processing them into many usable forms (cooking, drying, extracting, etc, etc) that admittedly is still there, but I don't spend near enough time with it.

I began dreaming up tea mixtures the other day, something I did years and years ago and only occasionally since. Thinking of formulations and recipes, and reasons for them. It's been on my mind so much that I drempt last night (in my spotty sleep...) of tea in a big two quart canning jar on the porch sunshine, bright red with flowers blooming inside of it.

Yesterday afternoon I began talking with one of the fathers of the kids I watch about thinking up more activities for the kids, seasonal, creative,and  fun. In the middle of the night I saw us making sun tea, mixing it with lemonade and drinking it through twisty straws. Making flower remedies by clipping the blossoms into a bowl of clean clear water. Picking rose petals to float in vegetable glycerin for later straining. (Evading the big huge bumblebees! Although I've told them they are really very nice, as long as we don't bother them...) Mixing up big batches of yummy pesto. Picking raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries to mix up with lemon balm and yoghurt into creamsicles...

(hm...love it...)

little munchkin!!!