Berry Picking
Few things are more peaceful and simultaneously refreshing as the quiet of picking berries. Blueberries, blackberries, black raspberries, strawberries…I grew up picking them all.
Sometimes, I picked on local farms as a side job. In fact, my very first job was picking strawberries on the weekends to be placed in a local market and shop where my mom enjoyed working part-time when she wasn’t home with my brother and me. I still remember the outfits I wore to pick: check and plaid patterned cotton button-ups with the sleeves rolled or tied around my waist to maximize that highly desirable summer suntan.
During the ten months that I moved back home from Brooklyn in 2020 as an adult with my husband, daughter, and dog, connecting to the property where I grew up took on new meaning. Despite the chaos of the world, the voice inside of me that had yearned to be closer to nature (closer to fresher air, closer to our food source) while living in the city was answered, and I found contentment.
One of the many fortunes of that summer back in Ohio was raising my newly walking daughter on the family property where both my father and grandfather grew up. And as we were just beginning feeding her solids about the time that our journey from Brooklyn began, having the berry bushes that my late grandmother planted roughly sixty years ago nearby made my soul sing.
My father was a young teenager when he remembers the berry bushes being planted. For me, running barefoot up the hill with a small bowl a few times of year to bring (what we didn’t eat of) the blueberries back to the house for pancakes became a real treat. My childhood was spent playing outside with my brother, and eating the berries early before the morning dew lifted or in the warmth of a summer evening are still some of my favorite pastimes.
During that summer of 2020, I worked remotely for one of New York’s largest real estate development companies. Luckily, most of my projects were at a place where I didn’t need to be onsite to keep them moving along in the development process. I spent my days working from a makeshift office on the back porch looking out at my grandmother’s peonies, and the gorgeous flower beds that my mother lovingly created when we moved into the house years before.
When possible on a conference call, I would water the vegetable gardens that we planted that year. Some days I would take a walk through the trails we had built when I was young. Other days I would weed. I recall a Tuesday afternoon on a weekly conference call that always went over an hour, that I began tending to the blueberry bushes. First pulling out oversized shoots of weeds poking out from the tops of the oversized bushes. Then I tackled all of the undergrowth. I uprooted anything that was not a blueberry bush. I continued to do the same for the raspberries and black raspberry bushes too. Already proud of the five newly planted raspberry bushes that I had planted in June, it seemed appropriate to also tend to what existed already.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I once again found therapeutic comfort in working with my hands, and with the berry bushes that were providing me nourishment, refuge from the confines of my desk, tending to my soul for the aches of change that were inevitably happening with my career and home back in Brooklyn. Most of all, these berry bushes were reigniting a calling in my soul to create, and to return to something that felt fulfilling.
And so, as I walked and carried my little Natalie with me through the berry bushes that summer, I made a careful point of moving slowly, of sharing with her stories of our family, and of making sure she picked the berries herself.
Come later that fall or winter, I cannot quite recall when, I continued care by pruning the long overdue branches too. The following summer, my brother and his family took the reins of keeping the property in our family for yet another generation. You can imagine my beaming pride, when our dear family friends sent a picture of about a dozen people together at the blueberry bushes collecting blueberries - some of them hoisted in the front-end loader of our John Deere - from one of the more memorable harvests we can recall. It was bittersweet to not be there in person, yet fulfilling to have provided the health and continuation of these special plants to flourish.
My father has shared with me in the past the gratitude and even whisper of “Thanks, Mom” that he feels when he enjoys a few blueberries while out in the lawn. I never had the chance to meet my grandmother, but I wonder what she would think of all this. Continuing to provide for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren long after her time here with us.
So, if you’ve been thinking about what to plant, or maybe have young children and want to educate them and provide an opportunity to connect them to the food that they eat, I would encourage you to plant berry bushes. You never know how their lineage may impact the future, and of the stories they might tell.