It is best to padlock the cellar-door. People who would never think of theft on ordinary occasions will break and enter, will smash in your door as they never would for gold ingots, to get at this wild-rose of a pan of strawberry cream.
Next noon, you bring up your flat crock, set it in the center of your table, equidistant from all and buttressed about with hot cream-of-tartar biscuits drenched in new butter, call in your very best friends, and fall to! This strawberry cream is the main dish, mark you, the only dish. It would be a sacrilege and an abdomination to have any other. There is no other dish in the universe to go with it. Use the biscuits as upholstery, and sail in! Sail is the word. For if anyone leaves this table without enjoying the profound conviction that he is wearing wings on his shoulders, wings on his temples, wings on both thighs, and wings on both heels, he is a hopeless lump of clay and no delicate eating will ever set him aflame.
Wild-strawberry cream is the high tide of summer, the tip-top highwater mark. After that, life is bound to slant off.
Yet there are some pretty fair later berries to slant off with gracefully. Raspberries come next. I mean wild raspberries. All the berries in this essay of mine are wild. Wild berries are to tame as the sun is to the moon. Of course, some people have to get along with the moon, but they are rather pindling people.
By raspberry time it is hot—oven-hot. You have to put the biggest rhubarb leaf you can get under your hat, to ward off the sun's rays. And you have to wear stout pants, or skirt. For raspberries grow in no such pleasant places as meadows. They get into skeletons of dead trees, into ravines, and around ledges.
But Illustrated by George Shellhase there's no sense courting sunstroke; so I'd start late in a July afternoon, and take my sweet time at picking.
Go to a place where the woods have been cut for about five years. Three years or four are not enough, for the brush will still have too much bite and gristle left in it. Go where the litter of boughs breaks when you step on it. Go right into the heart of the raspberry patch. Pay no attention to the little fellows that shine plain in the sun. Leave them for the robins. Go in deep. And when you get there, unwind your hair or your pants from barbed hooks of the raspberry vines, find a good wide log, and sit down.
Sitting down is the secret of good raspberrying. It is also easier on your pants and nerves, by the way. Raspberries call for a sitting posture. Sitting down pickers have all the luck. For once you have sunk into this green gloom, out of the sun, and recovered your serenity, you begin to see things. What you see is a wonder. All around you, over your head and reaching away into green infinity are the hearts of the woodland, hearts full of summer. The big raspberries are never in the sun, never at the tops of the bushes. They are too opulent for that. They hang here big as a robin's heart. Plump with beads of delicate juice, these garnet thimbles of spice betray themselves to your eyes.
The first thing to do is to eat about a pint of them. This really saves time. For once you have done it, you won't be tempted to eat any more as you pick, and you won't have to use your judgment on each handful to see whether the berries are too ripe to risk in the pail or not. But I warn you to be careful of spice-bugs. They are the color of the raspberry leaves, they look like leaves, they have the same crinkles on their edges. Once you bite into one, you will taste an ungodly taste that you may carry to your grave. So be on guard.
From your center of gravity where you sit, you can fill your pail in an hour or two, by expert rotation on your axis—with intervals, of course, when you move to a new base and rotate on that in turn. And then, unstruck by the sun, comparatively whole in your limbs and skin, you will go home leisurely at the hour when the evening thrushes are beginning to tune up.
You can get your thick country cream and go through the same ritual as with the strawberries, and—if you are a Spartan—wait till tomorrow for your feast. But since raspberries are not quite so tasty as wild strawberries when crushed in cream, I think you would do better to fetch your spoon right now and put the country cream over your berries, and a little powdered sugar—only a frost, not a snowstorm—and eat them right now, whole.
Next in the sliding calendar of summer come blueberries. For me, they are a big step down. There are people, though, who swear by them.
I find them hard to pick, first of all. They are another on-all-fours berry. But they choose to make you go over very rough terrain on all your fours. You may fall down a woodchuck hole or bark your shin on a knife of granite.
Then, they fill up too slowly. You may steep in the sun until you are almost at a boil, and get no more than two cupfuls. Blueberries are so small that they do not get ahead at all. And usually there are underdone ones or leaves you have to winnow out in each handful. They make slow going. And that is back-breaking.
It is kind of fun, though. So many pleasant things happen to you on the way. You may scare a partridge up into a small peal of feathery thunder. An inchworm gets on your knee, comes to the open air, and waves his head around. A freckle-lily suddenly appears right under your nose. A hummingbird may come to a wild lily-of-the-valley. Or maybe you sit up all at once on your knees, and there is a red fox staring you in the face, as surprised as you are, with diamonds in his eyes and his fan-tail curving. And he melts away without a sound. Or it may happen that a mother deer will come down your hill, with a fawn on incredible pipe-stems for legs beside her, and the two will be startled and turn to slender bronze, look at you for a long minute, and then leap like two arrows, and be gone into thin air.
Pinterest
