Bounty and Busyness in the Month of July

Caught up in the busyness of summer and a writing deadline, I missed my weekly post last week…not that any of you are keeping track, I’ll bet. You are probably busy, too.

Summer is always the season that takes you off guard with how busy it really is. You look forward to bare feet and sunshine and campfires and cookouts and summer squash and blueberries; you conceive plans to take your daughter swimming and make her a sandbox and sit in the fresh green grass with her and play with puppies…and then your breath is taken away in the whirling, bountiful rush that is summer.

You volunteer to teach summer Bible school because teachers are needed and you want to be an active, contributing member in the church. You pick blueberries and green beans and put them in the freezer. You try to keep up with lawn mowing. You realize your writing deadlines are going to be more difficult to meet than you realized…and by this time summer is maturing to mid-July and you’re planning a trip to a family reunion, wondering if you’ll ever get around to making that sandbox, and thinking to yourself that she’s really too young to enjoy swimming yet anyway.

So goes summer, a season that astounds us with both its bounty and its busyness.

With that being said, I plan to take a break from blogging for the month of August…and we’ll see what happens in the month of September. I already have a post or two in mind I want to share with you, and I like the stability of having that writing-and-sharing incentive, although keeping up with it can be challenging. So when September comes, I’ll see how I’m feeling about the state of affairs and let you know. :)

Before I go, I want to share a few of my favorite photos from this past month and also a few of my favorite lines from the gratitude journal I’ve been keeping. I highly recommend keeping such a journal and–if you haven’t read it yet–the book One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp.

• Cold small feet against my leg through my dress in the morning
• A child’s colorful crayon scribbles
• The precise shape of my two-year-old’s lip as she concentrates
• Small sounds of morning, the creak of a chair, scratch of pencil and crayons
• The first tart taste of orange juice

• The varied shades of red in the roses Ivan brought me
• Molasses cookies dipped in milk
• Round fat little girl toes
• Clothes on the line on a sunny day
• My dried purple sea-lavender on the kitchen windowsill

• Ivan and I planting flowers together
• The hay scent of Annalise’s hair
• Peonies bending the bush
• Coffee mugs, each with a different personality
• Sunday evening golf cart rides

• Blonde fine little girl hair like fairy dust in the wind
• Naps
• Him bending over her, dark against blonde, going brrrrrr on her little round head
• Smiles–friendly, shy, peeking from faces in every culture
• A cardinal on a fence post