yesterday

It's amazing how much you can do on a Sunday if you skip church. I am usually out the door by 9 (ish) for choir rehearsal and a service at 10. This summer I've been taking a break from choir but still making it to the service. I like going to church on Sunday morning. It grounds me for the week ahead, gives me things to think about, puts me in contact with people who share interests and commitments with me, puts me in contact with people who are very different from me...etc. I've gone to church far more Sundays than not in my life, first because I was taken there as a child and, over the last 13 or 14 years, by my own choice. Church takes up all of Sunday morning, then, and my usual Sunday afternoon pleasure is to lie on the couch with the Sunday New York Times.

But yesterday we decided to play hooky. I'd been to eucharist with Mariah when I picked her up from camp Friday, so I didn't really feel the need. And then, the rector's on vacation this month and one of my least-favorites was filling in. Actually I like the man himself, but I just can't listen to him preach. Or I won't. Ever since he somehow managed to get a reference to moon-pies and RC Cola into his retelling of the feeding of the 5000, I've had trouble taking him seriously.

So we went out to brunch instead. Yum. Our local Cuban restaurant does delicious things with eggs and bread. Good coffee, too.

Then we got ambitious, and decided to go pick peaches. There's an orchard a little over an hour away--or so I thought. We'd never been there. Still we piled in the car and headed west. While it was sunny and warm when we left the house, we drove through clouds and light showers along the way. Still, we pressed on. The kids were quiet in the back seat--still too full of eggs, maybe, to start anything.

It took more like an hour and a half but the countryside was lovely so we were fine. I'm always surprised by the rural landscape around here--there are vistas of rolling meadows and sunny valleys that will take your breath away. It's not terribly built up--you'll drive by falling-down trailer homes right next to stately old houses, and around the bend from much newer McMansions. We passed a couple of new developments, so urban sprawl is definitely a threat, though it hasn't quite been fulfilled yet. Because the rural area is really only an hour or so from a couple of major cities I guess people can commute, or retire, or something. But it's hard to figure what everyone does.

We found the peach orchard without any trouble and were handed a box and directions to the appropriate trees. They were so heavy with fruit even Nick could reach lots of huge, beautiful peaches. Many weren't quite ripe but we picked plenty--over 13 pounds, we found out when we returned. (There will be peach pie in our future--yum!) We only picked for about twenty minutes, I think, stopping when the box got too heavy and, not incidentally, we started to hear distant thunder. So we went back and paid, and as we were getting ready to order some home-made peach ice cream the skies opened up. Rain poured down in buckets on us. We took shelter under some pine trees for a while, and when they weren't enough we went back to the fruit stand, where the employees happily made room for us. We stood eating peach ice cream and watching the rain pour down off the tin roof in sheets.

It lightened up just as we were finishing our ice cream so we loaded ourselves and our peaches back into the car and headed home. There were two or three monster downpours on the way home, too: windshield wipers on high, we still couldn't really see the cars right ahead. Some people pulled over to wait it out; we drove on carefully.

And when we got home the sky was clear and blue, the roads dry. There were puffy white clouds in the sky. It was warm enough that we took a short trip over to the pool before dinner.

That was a lot to do in one day. See how much time you save when you skip church? But I still haven't read the paper.