Sorry in summer

Yesterday I emailed a friend who lives on a farm in Prince George and has a big raspberry business. There's something wrong with my raspberries, I wrote in despair, do you have any idea what this is? And sent pictures of the yellowing striated leaves with brown patches, the shrivelled fruit.

She thinks it's a magnesium deficiency, and the cure is a spray of Epsom salts. "And afterwards, you can have a bath in them," she wrote. I'm off to Shoppers to buy Epsom salts for my deprived raspberries. What a wonderful world.

Yesterday was my father's yahrzeit - July 6 the day he died in 1988, 32 years ago. I celebrate every day the gifts he gave.

How I wish he could see another form of his legacy - his great-grandsons, including the one who looks a great deal like him as a boy. Eli and Ben rode over with their dad Thomas yesterday, all the way from their house to mine, a long hot ride. Tall 8-year old Eli has done it before, but Ben is four, and a small four at that. But tough as can be, wanting to do everything his big brother does. Thomas gives him a push every so  often, when he tires. They spent the afternoon here, with lunch and then to the splash pad on Wellesley, hours of delight.

And for me too, as I sat watching children scream with joy under the sprinklers. Around me the parents - one a trans man with many tattoos and a pierced lip, beaming as he guided his tiny daughter to the edge of a puddle; a mother with the sides of her head shaved, a naked woman tattooed on her back, and many cutting scars on her thighs; a Black family, an Asian family, an East-Indian family, all the children a multi-coloured blur of activity. Ben never stopped running.

A game of Sorry to cool down,

and then to the new ice cream store on Dundas East for  their second ice cream treat of the day. What are Glammas for? I had a Muskoka Mocha cone, delish. And then, after an exhausting afternoon of running and shrieking, they set off, riding back across town. Very tired when they got home, another gift for their mama, who was grateful for some time off.

And I watched a PBS documentary on suffrage for women. I knew about the suffragettes but didn't know quite how brutally hard it was to convince men to allow women to vote. We take so much for granted. But I do try not to take anything for granted. Especially them. And this.