Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Summer is fast approaching. I have to finish up school, give my kids their end of grade tests, begin three classes next week, find some sort of summer work, get a new apartment, organize my lesson plans for next year, dismantle my classroom, remantle (a word? should be) my classroom, work out my lateral entry teaching license, swim in my apartment complex's pool as much as possible, save my dying plant, organize my personal finances...you get the point.

But all of this seems more bearable now that I know I can pick strawberries in a for real-life patch for a small fee! I've never picked a strawberry...I've never even considered doing such a thing. When my students told me I could do so right near my school I expressed childish delight and a sudden squeal.

I picked a berry or two once in Oregon...but it wasn't in a patch. It was one of those really painful berries surrounded by thorns and so fragile that it was juice by the time we got them home...I can't remember if they were blackberry or raspberry but it didn't matter since we killed them all. It also rained that day so we went home soaking wet with bloody hands.

No bleeding for strawberries, so say my students! I love the things I can do here that I can't do anywhere else. I like to feel like a tourist... I guess it helps to remind me that I do, indeed, get to go home someday. I need to pick strawberries because I will leave here and not be able to.

My plan is to pick lots of berries and then eat them.