Sunday, September 2, 2007

Palisade Peaches on Sunday Afternoon

Today I was thinking about simple pleasures as I was eating peach pie ala mode made with the famous Palisade peaches. It's one of the many benefits of living in western Colorado. Not to short change the Colorado National Monument or Olathe sweet corn each a wonder onto itself. Holding on to the wonder past six years old is so hard in today's world. No matter how we shelter our children the world intrudes in ways we could not have imagined when we were six. The world of my childhood included playing unsupervised ten hours a day in the summer with all the other children on the block. Halloween meant hours, even after dark, of ringing doorbells and eating everything in our bags with no xrays. Couples on television slept in separate beds and the biggest problem the Beaver faced was grass stains on his school pants. I know my parents and grandparents, too, watched as the world spun faster and faster and now we seem to have it warp speed. Information flies at us, invisibly, through the air we breathe. How do we stop it, or at least slow it down. There are some old-fashioned ideas still taking place in homes across the country like board game night and Sunday dinner. I think we owe it to our children to slow the world down whenever we can. It's not always easy, and in fact, it usually is met with some resistance like the family camping trip but it is essential to our and our families physical and emotional health. So this coming week make plans to slow down, bake a peach pie, invite the family to the table and sit around after dinner playing Monopoly or Clue.

1 comment:

ClaireWalter said...

When we try to slow the world down for our children, perhaps we really want to slow it down for ourselves. Remember when the time between the start of school (2nd week in Sept for me in CT) and Halloween seemed forever? And then when T-giving and Xmas, which now seem on top of each other, seemed so far away. The interval to President's Week was long. It was slow going until Easter week and summer vacation was lightyears ago. While we may want to shelter our children from what we think of as a fast-paced world, I suspect that the pages of their internal calendard still turn slowly. Bake the pie anyway!