(HOST) Commentator Deborah Lee Luskin has been spending a lot of time
harvesting a bumper crop of raspberries – as well as thoughts about the
cycle of the seasons.
(LUSKIN) I’m blessed with raspberries.
We
transplanted the cultivars we found by the back door when we moved into
our current house sixteen years ago, and now have about 120 linear feet
of highly productive bushes between the bee yard and the clothesline.
This
optimal placement allows me to keep an eye on the health and activity
of my honeybees as well on the developing fruit as I pin up and take
down my sun-dried laundry.
By early July, the promise of
ripening berries becomes an added inducement to performing this
household chore, as each trip to the line is an excuse to check for
signs of reddening fruit.
At first, only a handful of berries
ripen, and I claim them as just reward for doing the wash. A day later, I
make a special trip to the berry patch and bring in a full bowl for
family breakfast. After just a few hot days, the harvest is on. Wearing
long sleeves against briars and a straw hat against sun, I hang a bucket
around my neck, so I can pick two-handed.
At first, I pick a
gallon of berries once a day; it takes me just under an hour. We eat
berries for breakfast with cereal, for lunch with yogurt, and with ice
cream after dinner. The weather continues hot and dry. The patch now
yields a gallon two times a day, and I’d like to make jam, but I don’t
have the time. I’m too busy picking. I enlist the other members of the
household to pick when they return from their day jobs, and they do the
best they can – until the bugs drive them inside.
I’m now
oppressed by raspberries. I call in the neighbors, assigning each an
afternoon. I only ask that they pick clean and take all their bounty
home with them. I still pick mornings, and freeze the berries on trays.
If there’s time after dinner, I’ll make raspberry jam, raspberry
vinegar, and raspberry syrup. But there’s never time. After dinner it’s
all I can do to place the frozen berries in bags and think ahead to the
monochromatic months of winter, when these red berries will add vibrant
color to our meals, and remind us of July’s sun-drenched heat, with the
jungle profusion of green on the ground, on the hills, in the air.
I
think of Frederick, the mouse in the famous children’s book, who soaks
up the colors of summer so that he will be able to provide poetry to his
hungry friends come the meager months of spring. Instead of words or
colors, I put raspberries by, so that when the cold is upon us, we’ll be
able to taste the bounty that is past – and yet to come.