Raspberries are one of the sweet and fleeting pleasures of
summer, and never more so than when they are wild, picked from a patch out
back. Here in Little Compton, the fruit lady cultivates very good raspberries,
as close to wild as you can get, full of flavor, red, yellow, and black. But I
have a patch, and it is with a little thrill of hopeful anticipation tinged
with dread that I approach the patch on my return to LC each year to see what
the season will, or will not, bring.
It is not a good year for raspberries, at least for the
early run. The fruit lady told me on my first day here, before I’d checked my
own more native crop, that the raspberries were sparse this year, and small.
The early warmth followed by a cool and wet June were good for some
things—everything is coming in early, much to the farmers’, and to some of our,
chagrin—but not for the raspberries.
Walking out to my own little raspberry bushes, I find the
same situation: small fruit, sparsely scattered across the briar. Expecting as much, I have brought a little
bowl, and proceed to try to fill it. Picking raspberries is always a challenge.
Raspberries like to hide beneath leaves, and the ripest ones delight in hiding
deep inside the patch. You have to really get into it—literally—and plunge into
the thorny mass, lifting the tangled
branches, pricking your fingers and catching your clothes with each step.
Vigilance, and a swiveling gaze are essential.
And you must circle the patch multiple times, as that section you are
sure you have stripped of every berry invariably has yet another or two; I feel
sure, sometimes, that these berries have ripened red in the few minutes that I
was on the other side.
All this work produced perhaps a large cupful of berries and
many scratches around the ankles and on the forearms. I pick them over for the
occasional bug or tiny hairlike white worm. There are not enough to do anything
other than eat them (the raspberries, not the worms), which is, perhaps, their
highest calling. So I do—harking these words, with apologies to Robert Herrick
for paraphrasing “To the Virgins, to make much of Time.”
Gather ye raspberries
while ye may,
Old Time is still
a-flying;
And this same flower
that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be
dying.
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