All that we have July 16, 2010 Frustrated that I've stained my favorite gray coat while picking raspberries in the back yard, I bustle inside to start scrubbing. Three years ago, neighbors and friends picked these bushes clean while I slept on a cot next to my husband's hospital bed, holding his hand across the gap, wondering if he'd ever eat the fruit from our yard again. They picked the bushes clean and froze the fruit, with all the confidence in the world that we'd come home to reap the sweetness of our freezer. People say to me, "You have such a wonderful life!" They say, "You are so lucky." They say, "How do you do it?" I smile and nod, but wonder, how lucky is a brain tumor in July, when the berries are at their peak? And, I wonder: How many choices have you made in your life that take you away from the harvest when you could have been there? How many chances do you get to feel the sun-warmed berries in your fingers? Me? I'll take the stains, thank you. A tattoo of juice and life and jam. And, yes, for the record, I see that we are "so lucky." I'll lick the raspberry fragments from my own fingers, and his. I'll wallow in the over-ripe sweetness of all that we have. icking those berries and putting them in your freezer was a complete pleasure. it was *the least* we could do to help in a