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There was a time in my life when from spring to
September, and sometimes on into November, I was busy earning my keep
harvesting wild and domestic berries. First the strawberries in June and
then the black raspberries, red raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries
all had their turns slipping through my fingers and into my larder. As
summer ripened, autumn’s red and gold raspberries swelled and finally the
season crowned with sprays of elderberry and twines of bittersweet.
We sold our fruit, jams, jellies, honey, garlic, and radishes, whatever we
didn’t put up for the winter, at the local farmer's market. During a good
berry year, on picking days, I would pluck so many berries that when I
closed my eyes the berries would continue to sway behind my eyelids
summoning for me to select them, all night long. Sometimes past midnight,
in a place between wake and sleep, the biggest berry that I had ever seen
would appear, hanging just out of reach. I stretched through scratchy
briars, stinging nettles and ragged thorns to obtain it. I grasped
endlessly but never held in my hands that ever elusive, perfect berry.
When waking up on those mornings I often felt like I had picked berries
from the beginning of time through all of eternity. That was why I
laughed out loud when I read Robert Frost’s poem, After Apple Picking,
and I came upon these lines.
“For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.”
Yes, I had indeed desired a great berry harvest. The longing was first
seeded in me when I was a child in the Appalachian hills of Southeastern
Ohio. Grandma and Grandpa took my brother and sister and I to the meadows
surrounding their home to fill our baskets with plump berries for
Grandmother to bake into cobbler. There was a great sense of
accomplishment in this ritual. Our favorite was the native, wild, black
raspberry, which according to Grandma could not be compared with any
other. I have since learned that this sweet purple berry is indigenous
only to North America. Lucky us.
Recently I was conversing with Grandfather, now 97. He reminisced
that in his berry bramble days he couldn’t stop picking until his pails
were full. This made me smile. Perhaps the urge to forage the bramble is
something that I inherited. I told Grandpa that I have always been the
same way. We laughed and complimented each other that we have
 good
old-fashioned bramble-blood coursing through our veins.
In those childhood days our mother would take us to the local berry farms
that hosted "u-picks." The drive lead us past homesteads, woods, and
meadows until finally, at the farm, they handed out pails and pointed us
in a direction to pick from in the vast field of bushes. I liked the feel
of the sunshine on my head and hearing the berries go ding and ping as
they hit the insides of the metal pails. There would be a certain change
of mood in me when the berries stopped pinging and began thudding, landing
on each other and filling up the insides of the pails. It made me feel
rich.
When I was eleven my family moved and we settled in the foothills of the
Ozarks in Missouri. The meadows adjoining our homestead hosted patches of
wild brambles, which in the summers became laden with fruit. As a
teenager my berry-bramble-blood proved true and I braved the chiggers,
snakes, and the notorious Missouri ticks to claim those berries as my own.
(continued)
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