As summer ripens and gardens grow unruly, I’m taken 
back to when I was a small child and had an amazing babysitter. She was truly more than a babysitter as I called her grandma and she treated me like a grandchild. She was the most consummate gardener that I’ve ever met and she had a huge garden where she grew lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, and all manner of yummy things.
She had an old wooden salad bowl that she made salad in for dinner every night. Salad was always lettuce, tomatoes, and feta cheese dressed with oil and vinegar. During the summer months, the lettuce and tomatoes were fresh from the garden and picked within an hour of being eaten. There was nothing like eating bibb lettuce with fresh tomatoes. It was the very definition of summer harvest. And the oil and vinegar had seeped into the wood of that salad bowl so that every time you picked it up you could smell a faint whiff of summer salad.
Grandma Elda also had raspberry bushes and eating those berries fresh off the bush was an amazing treat. They tasted so sweet and juicy and I loved how they were still warm from the bush. I remember days out eating those berries and ending up with red fingers from picking them off the bush and putting them right into my mouth.
Even today, I would prefer to eat my fruit warm and not cold from the fridge. In a perfect world, I’d always be able to go and pluck my food straight from Mama Earth and eat it right then and there.
I don’t think I have a picture of one of those everyday feasts that Grandma Elda prepared, but the picture below is a picture of her with me at my first birthday party.
Cairn by Cairn 