Good memories

I spend a lot of time talking about difficult memories, or certainly dealing with them, but today I had a lovely one. 

I was at our local farm shop for some baking ingredients (bargain ripe plums for a frangipane...) and I always take my time and let Little Peggy have a wander when we're out and about - the world is still a wonder to him and I love to see where his interest takes him, look at things from his perspective and think about what he's learning from it, but that's a post for another day!

Anyway, I digress! I found some beautiful plump juicy cherries and with great flexibility of thinking (I had not gone shopping for cherries) I went back for some after our trundle of the shop. 

The sight of those gorgeous cherries in their brown bag and then the feel of the scrunched up paper as I carried them to the till took me right back to a happy summer years ago (I don't imagine it was happy 100% of the time, but that was the emotion it evoked!).

When I bit into the first cherry later at home I was flooded with warm sunshine and memories of my sister and me having a cherry obsession and walking to buy them from the market every week, and one time sitting on the bus to Winchester eating cherries from a paper bag! The warm connected feelings of walking together spending quality time, or of somebody arriving home and declaring they had bought you cherries. And of exercising our new-found freedoms and discoveries after some difficult life circumstances. 

And it's funny, because I still like cherries and I buy them from the supermarket from time to time and think about how we used to treat ourselves and each other to them, but it was the whole experience, and particularly the texture of biting into the cherry and tasting it - so different from a supermarket cherry - that really transported me back. 

Thinking and experiencing are worlds apart and it's wonderful to have a purely positive example of that!