Orchard

When people discover we moved from the lakeshore to a small town an hour inland, they think we are crazy.  Maybe. Who knows?  Now that it's been a year they ask if we miss it.  As in: did we make a mistake.  The answer is always no.  We didn't make a mistake, we don't miss it.  The trade-offs are more than we gave up.  The lake will always be there.  There is one thing we miss very, very much.  We miss the orchards.  At the lake we were no more than two miles from an orchard.  It's my policy in the summertime to pick my own fruit.  Usually I say, "I don't eat it if I didn't pick it."  There are several reasons:  it's cheaper,  it's fresher, I know what's on the bottom of the container because I put it there. The sun is warm, the birds are singing, sometimes other people are around and sometimes I am alone.
We have no orchards here.  This is serious farm country, not fruit farms.  I made just one strawberry pie last summer because I discovered I had to drive about 20 miles to a strawberry U-Pick.  That rocked my boat no end.

 I miss this vista of fruit just waiting to ripen and be picked.

 It's one of the things the girls love doing and we made sure we did this everytime they came to visit.  Now it's a special trip, but very much worth it.  I love watching them run toward the trees to get started. Friends are giving us their house for a week this summer and this is most definitely on the list of things to do.

 Adelaide wants the ladders.  She's a fearless climber and heads for the ladder every time. Elizabeth climbs but needs to know where the ground is.

These pictures were from last summer so we did make the effort to go back to the lake to pick- or rather we made the effort to pick when we went back to the lake.  But that's just it.  No longer is this summer ritual effortless. That's what I miss.