We hatched a plan, a scheme born on a late-night text thread (because 9:30 PM is late now) and a chance encounter with a thicket earlier in the week.

Last week, my daughters and some friends went for a hike in a park rather far from our home, and on the way back found ourselves winding through a labyrinth of blackberry bushes far above our heads. Lacking any containers for them, we snacked as we walked, and vowed to come back again soon. Knowing that we had friends who lived close by, I thought to invite them along. A condensed recap of our conversation:

Me: Do you like picking blackberries? Do your kids? Not sure if mine do, but there are a bunch at this park near you. Want to come pick some with us?

Friend: Um… YES. We would love that.

Me: Good. Let’s do it.

Berry picking has become a bit of an Event these days. Many of my peers spend a good part of a day—often a weekend—driving out to farms in the silt-rich river valleys north of Seattle to and bringing home sticky kids and fresh-picked blueberries and raspberries. It’s not a terrible idea, in general, but for the most part I’ve stashed it in the “Long Drive, Short Activity” file, along with apple picking and a local tulip festival, as something that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for my carsickness-prone kids, at least at this point. Maybe someday. Blackberry picking, though, that’s different.

Blackberry picking hasn’t ever been an event, but if I squint backwards it was always there, like long days and cool nights, a staple of growing up where we did. We’d plunge into the woods in search of berries, emerging with so many Tupperwares full that my mom made enough jam for the whole year, big quart jars that lined our pantry in a way that must have made her feel proud. Once we moved to the city, we still found plenty of the invasive Himalayan blackberries around the messy margins of neglected alleys, roadsides and even parks to keep our jam habit alive, provide at least a good pie a summer. Even in Germany there were blackberries, though I can only ever remember myself getting excited about picking them. Last year, I cultivated the vine overgrowing our garage, watching the berries ripen and picking them at just the right moment. Blackberry picking is wild, off the books, a little risky, frankly (see: my scratched legs) and the berries cost exactly nothing. What could go wrong?

It’s late morning and well over 75˚ F when we arrive at the park, two mothers and three little girls on an adventure. The girls skip down the trail ahead of us, approaching the sharp vines with varying levels of interest and caution. It quickly becomes clear that we’ve arrived both a week late, missing a whole bunch of berries that have ripened and dried on the vines, and two weeks early, when all these green ones we see will be ready to go. We assess the crop with the expertise of two locals, diagnosing the small berries expertly as being “too small because it’s too hot.” You can’t buy this kind of knowledge, folks. We’re from Seattle.

We’ve known each other a long time, since we were young and single, when life felt freer and more chaotic, and a hot day meant that the bachelorette party, to which we had to wear black while the bride wore white, was going to be absolutely sweltering. Now, we’re not super young and not at all single, and this hot morning means we spend ten minutes covering all the skin with all the sunscreen, jogging behind jogging kids and making sure everyone is drinking enough water. So much has changed—in our lives, in the world around us—that today feels like magic, like somehow we’ve managed to time travel with our daughters back to a moment when all there was to do on a summer morning was hang out with your friends and pick some berries.

We laugh as we get further down the trail, rattling our few cups of berries and amending our expectations down from “enough for jam” to “enough for pie” to “it’s too hot to make pie; let’s just make syrup.” (When we get home, I just scatter handfuls over cups of Cookies & Cream and freeze the rest for a day when having the oven on seems less evil.) One of the three girls doesn’t care for this—though she has no hesitation about transferring a good number of ripe berries directly from the vine to her mouth—but the other two are enamored, the thrill of urban foraging overtaking their fear of thorns. They compare scratched hands and arms, proud of their boldness, and hold up half-full containers with glee. When it’s time to go, they want to stay until they’re filled, always finding better berries, and more, just around the corner. But it’s almost 80˚ F, almost lunchtime, and my youngest is almost saturated with berry juice, so we go our separate ways for now, they to the errands and we back to the car to fetch sun-warmed peanut butter and jelly.

I’ve been reading children’s books forever, since I was a child myself but then in an unbroken streak until now, when I’m the chief librarian for a voracious almost-second-grader. And it wasn’t until this summer that I noticed that just as many picture books for the under five crowd end with the protagonists going to sleep (no matter what kind of adventures they might have been having on the pages prior), many of the classic tales spun for their elder siblings begin with disappointment or boredom.

My daughters and I are reading Edward Eager’s books this summer, which begin with Half Magic, and so far all of them have started with both boredom and disappointment: more specifically, with kids who were disappointed by summers that fell far short of their expectations. Though I haven’t read it myself, my eldest came home this summer with a gift from her deeply perceptive former teacher, a book titled Judy Moody and the Not-Bummer Summer, which seems a rather overt nod to the trope.

Though often there are grown up troubles in the background of these stories—illness or war or separations—the focus remains with the children, for whom these disruptions often present as dullness and thwarted hopes. The Penderwicks couldn’t go to their regular vacation home, so needed to find a new one. The March sisters have no presents for Christmas, and the Pevensie kids are stuck inside the strange professor’s mansion because of the rain.

It makes sense, I suppose, that summer is where children would place their dearest hopes and face their gravest disappointments, that the rituals of summer—whether specific vacations or more general adventures—are so pleasant that the disruption of them would be a certified Big Deal around which to spin a tale. If necessity is the mother of grown-up inventions, then for kids it seems like boredom is its true origin story, because what do they need more than something new to see and do, a shake-up of the very routine nature of their little lives?

I’ve thought of these disappointing literary summers often lately. A short but real list of circumstances (a rambunctious puppy, an overseas partner, ill-timed sicknesses, um… a really good tomato crop) have kept us mostly in town this summer, and though I’m not exactly disappointed, I’ve occasionally felt a twinge of guilt, looking over at my fellow parents who seem consumed with making “summer magic” for their kids and wondering if I’ve compromised that whole operation a bit, have leaned into the limits of my own superpowers instead of stretching to overcome them. Couldn’t we have, I don’t know, gone and done… something? Where’s our magic wardrobe, talisman, toy soldier? Was that supposed to be me?

Back at the car, I give the kids options, per the parenting experts du jour. We can eat this lunch in the car on the way home, or we can eat here in the park.

“Could we…” begins my eldest, eyes widening. “Could we walk to our secret spot and eat there?”

The Secret Spot, for the record, is not so much secret as it is poorly-marked, a creek trickling flatly down the bottom of a deep ravine shaded with the muscled arms of broadleaf maples. It’s also a bit of a walk, and we’ve already walked a good deal in pursuit of berries this morning.

“We can, but it’s a hike,” I caution. “Do you want to hike there and back just for lunch? And maybe—”

“Maybe a little rope swing?” my youngest finishes for me, already nodding her whole purple face in assent.

“Maybe a few swings,” I confirm. That’s it. They’re in for the hike, which is genuinely a wild scramble down the sandy wall of the canyon, dodging nettles and fording the icy edges of the little creek where it’s washed the trail away. It’s at least ten degrees cooler at the bottom, the shady oasis of our dreams.

We’ve been here often this summer, but it still nearly takes my breath away to see my children skip confidently over cement stepping stones and hoist themselves up on a blue nylon rope swing, dangling out over the water. I’m not afraid, or in a hurry, or telling them to be careful. The feeling is more like awe, that they’re suddenly this big, rope swing big and creek crossing big. Awe that we’ve found a place, mostly by accident, where we can travel back and back to before Instagram and Pedalheads and Little Kickers, back to blackberries and a creek, to friendship on a hot summer day. It’s not Narnia, exactly, but it’s magic enough for us.