Natural Park

• Awake at 1:00.  
• Awake at 2:00. 
• Reading at 3:00. 
• Eating toast and drinking coffee at 4:00.
• We have some raspberry preserves on hand, here.  I'm not sure why we have them; the others prefer strawberry, and I don't care for the seeds in the raspberry.  Sometimes I buy seedless.  The last time I actually made raspberry preserves, I strained out half the seeds.  In any case, I put some on my 4AM toast this morning.
• And the FIRST TASTE took me to Natural Park.
• When we were kids growing up in the mountains, a few times every summer we would walk up and down, through some fields, zigzagging down the sides of hills, and end up in a glen that our friends the Sanborns had named Natural Park.  
• Actually, it might have been the Cusacks who named it that.  
• Anyway.  Such an imaginative name.
• The thing is, wild raspberries grew there.  We would bring pots- the weight of the berries themselves crushed the juice out of the first layer, so baskets, although picturesque, were not appropriate for the job.  It was usually hot, always scratchy, and sort of sticky and staining.  Anyway, then we would bring the berries home and if there were enough, Mother would make preserves.
• All kinds of stories sprang from the place.  Myth, for sure, is the one I told about encountering a bear there; certainly that one borrowed heavily from Blueberries for Sal. Not that we did NOT encounter bears growing up; we did.  And I told that story enough that I can almost believe it. 
• All of this, friends, from a piece of toast at 4AM.  Try it.  Who knows what will happen to you?