Taking it outside.

Biking in the park today, two wonderful things happened: I ate berries and watched some kids.

There's a path on my usual bike route that's up against the very edge of the park - next to the path is a fence, and over the fence is an uncultivated hillside, and at the bottom of the hill is the West Side Highway and the Hudson river. The uncultivated hillside creeps in over, under, and through the fence. To the best of my knowledge, it's been deliberately left to its own devices. So if something happens to grow successfully, it keeps going.

Wild raspberries, for example.

Not many, because the season just started. A few, because birds are usually quick to eat them. Barely a handful, because that was all I needed to have the flavor spread out over my tongue and get some seeds to crunch between my teeth.

As for the kids, they were heading south while I was heading north. The bike path I use is next to the fence, and on the other side of the path is a long strip of public lawn, then another path, then another hillside, then on top of that hillside is Riverside Drive. I was heading north on the western path, about twelve of them were heading south on the eastern one, and they all had beach towels.

Mostly, I noticed the towels. The presence of them.

The kids followed their adult supervisors, and talked between themselves, making a few smaller clusters within the main group. As happens with kids. But the towels caught my eye because of every summer day I ever spent going to the pool with other kids. I knew there wasn't a pool around, and a few minutes later, biking south, I saw they'd brought the towels to have something clean to sit on, which I don't blame them for in the least.

And still - to have seen that memory brought to life for a moment outside of myself, so vividly, was an absolute wonder.