prickly situations.

Shirt: Gap. Jeans: Madewell. Sunglasses: Kate Spade. Watch: c/o Arvo.

We picked blackberries for family home evening last night.  We’ve got a whole army of these thorny bushes growing in a protective semi-circle around our yard; big prickly branches growing right up and often over (or through) our fence.  Sometimes I feel like Sleeping Beauty, encompassed by an unpleasant sea of thorny vines… But around August those blackberries get ripe and they fill the air with the sweetest perfume and make lots and lots of summer pies just a few pricked fingers away.  That’s one benefit of dealing with the weed of death year-round, all the sweet blackberries we can handle come summer’s end.

Plus, my adventurous ducklings (for some unfathomable reason), think creating secret hideouts amid the bushes, is basically the cat’s meow, so there’s that as well.  A nice homey thorn-filled fort.

I kept thinking how good things often come out of prickly situations, even if the process of getting them can be a little painful.  As I was picking blackberries and watching the kids dump purple handfuls into the bowl I was thinking about all the sweet things God has given me out of what I thought were rather unfortunate situations, and how blessed I’ve been even when I felt like the sky was falling down.  How each experience leads to another and years later, or sometimes in no time at all I start to see the perspective and all those (what felt like) unfortunate events, turn out to be quite fortunate indeed.

Yesterday, we fought our way through the thorns for that big bowl of blackberries.

Today, we make pie!

ps. this top is one of the very best purchases I’ve made this summer, and I’ve worn it approximately 18 times already.   Also, living in these Madewell skinnies.  What are they doing to their denim?  It is out of this world.

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