My nephew gave me a jar of homemade strawberry jam yesterday.
I remember all the times my sisters and I made jam with my mom. How the fresh berries we’d pick, that I wanted to eat right then, were marked for jam. It felt like an enormous injustice in the moment but by winter it was a distant memory when I layered summer sweetness over buttered toast.
The gift of jam also made me think of the poem, “Answers,” by Mary Oliver and of how sweet simplicity is; uncomplicated happiness without the weight of obligations, and of how things were or should be.
In these first days of summer, what calls you home to simplicity? Allow yourself to be at ease with whatever is; allow being to be the answer.
