Voices in the Hills by Nessa Flax

Author:Nessa Flax
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bunker Hill Publishing Inc
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

an embarrassment of berries

When we bought our place, we inherited a raspberry patch. It’s probably as old as the house. I suspect more than a century of berries has come out of this unruly thicket of nature’s glory. Even old-timers can’t name one of the cultivated varieties here.

This plant produces berries the shape and size of a thimble. Nearly an inch long, perfectly conical and sweet, they are almost seedless. Really. This is not just a proud momma bragging. I have witnesses.

Picked warm in the afternoon sun, the berries melt in your mouth like raspberry cotton candy newly spun … so delicious it nearly breaks your heart.

Like much else in the North Country, the patch has a mind of its own. Disdaining orderly ranks, it marches to the beat of an untamed drum. The cane grows like small tree branches—tough and sturdy, rising nearly six feet if unpruned, bending and weaving together in leafy embrace.

Untended for many years, the patch was a tangled nightmare of dead cane and new growth. “Mow it down,” many advised. “There’s nothing else you can do.”

But I love raspberries. As snarled as the poor patch was, its twisted jumble offered a veritable embarrassment of berries. Red riches glowing in golden sunlight. To sacrifice such bounty seemed a sacrilege.

I knew nothing of raspberries. I had never tended a crop nor cultivated any plot of land. So, for the first three seasons, I simply observed.

Gradually, the patch revealed its secrets. Cane that looks dead in the early spring is dormant and will bear summer’s berries. It is easiest to distinguish dead cane in late spring by the absence of leafy shoots. Emerging growth is inconveniently underfoot but cannot be cut. Those plants will bear next year’s berries.

In those first years, I picked by wriggling through the thicket on my belly like a combat soldier moving under barbed wire. Flipping onto my back on the damp ground, reaching up through twisted branches to grasp one berry at a time.

Finally, I began cautiously to care for the plants. I was terrified I’d violate one of nature’s raspberry rules and ruin the gift given to me.

But the patch tolerated my down-country fumbling and flourished. My crops now come in gallons, not pints.

Every summer, day after day, my kitchen counters are covered with cookie sheets and platters of red gold. Filled with wonder, camera in hand like a tourist on my own land, I take pictures of the harvest.

I can no longer imagine a winter without raspberries. The rattiest raspberry in August is a miracle in March.

There is magic in the land.

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