I’m not sure how this happened, but I found myself assigned with the chore of picking raspberries yesterday for our CSA shareholders all by my lonesome. Matty had to work, so the task was left to me. Why do such gardening activities always happen on the hottest day of the year? I had to finish writing a chapter before going outside to pick. Yes, I know you really should pick stuff in the morning when it’s not so hot outside, but that sage advise didn’t really work out for me. I had to get my work done first. It’s all about priorities, you know. So, by the time I finished my chapter, it was 1:00 and the heat was on.
I’m not sure every area of the country fully appreciates the heavy, moisture-laden heat that comes often in the summer weather. It’s a heat that seems to lie on you like an unwelcome blanket. Midwesterners are very familiar with this type of heat. As soon as you step out the door, it hits you in the face and demands your notice. I wonder how many times a day during these scorchers the phrase “it’s hot out here” is uttered? I’m guessing millions of times. When it’s hideously hot outside like yesterday, you cannot help but utter the phrase out loud and repeatedly. I did.
Out I go to the edges of the far fields to collect the precious raspberries with my berry bucket. Our berries grow wild out here at the swamp farm, and they almost surround the perimeter of the back property, along with other thorny shrubberies, such as natural roses. Wild raspberries are smaller than the raspberries you find in the store or on commercial shrubs brought home from the nursery, but they’re just as good. I began at one end of the field and started picking. Thankfully, Matty had mowed a bit the day before and I was able to stand quite close to many of the thickets. It didn’t take long before I realized I was going to have to go deeper into the thickets to get the berries.
I don’t know about you, but whenever I go to one of those U-Pick farms, I try to have a goal in mind of how much I need. If I’m strawberry picking, for example, I try to decide ahead of time what I’m going to make and how much I need. Once I get picking, however, something snaps in me. Suddenly it becomes a competition, an feverish quest to pick as many as I can. I am somehow driven beyond my original plans. Like a pirate finding a hidden cave full of gold doubloons, I start grabbing every ripened fruit I can see, and try reaching desperately for those just beyond my arm length.
Unlike strawberry picking, however, you can do some serious damage to yourself in a raspberry thicket. Within moments I am covered in tiny scratches. Do you ever find yourself starting a project only to realize you don’t have the right equipment? This was one of those times for me. I was dressed for the heat, not for the wicked thorniness that comprises a raspberry patch. I thought for a moment about hiking all the way back to the house for a long sleeve shirt, my wellies (tall, rubber galoshes), and gloves. But it was so hot, I was sure I couldn’t bear wearing all those items. So I pressed on.
In hindsight, maybe I should have attired myself appropriately. I am now covered in welts and scratches from head to toe. I nearly had several mishaps trying to reach far beyond where my arms could go, and at the time, thought to myself how painful it would be to land full-on into the thicket with its millions of pointy, sharp thorns. If I did fall in, how long would it take before they found me? While I did not fall bodily, I did manage to get my legs caught, my shirt caught, my shorts caught, my arms caught, and my hair caught in the wayward branches. Each time I’d free myself and grimmace at the new scratch or prick. I had berry fever, though, and had to keep going. My plan was to give away a package of berries to each of our shareholders that evening as a bonus item in their harvest bags. The berries were small, so it was going to take some doing to accumulate enough, or so I thought.
Onward I went, picking, reaching, and swatting flies and mosquitoes all the way. As it turns out, I was not the only creature out there. There were other critters in the thickets with me. The birds were yelling at me and zipping in and out to find their own berry treasure booty. I was also competing with a small miniature dachshund who, oddly enough, also likes raspberries. She snuffled along the bottoms of the thickets gobbling up the fallen berries. A deer came by and snorted at me, also surprised to find competition in the berry-laden thickets. My main company, however, were the bugs.
I picked, and I picked, and I picked. I swatted and I sweated, but I kept going. I kept sticking my arms in farther and farther into the brambles. There was always a juicy berry just beyond my grasp. Or worse, I’d grab a big one only to drop it. No time to weep for lost berries, though, I had to keep going.
Boy, it was hot out there.
I must have been out there for a couple of hours, but I'm not really sure since I was suffering from berry-fever. Did I mention how hot it was? Boy, it was hot.
Despite all the hardships, there’s something very relaxing about picking wild raspberries. You get the opportunity to focus on a simple task and marvel at what a wonderful design the little raspberry is. It’s a brilliant idea, really, this raspberry design. God made them wonderfully tasty, yet difficult to obtain. To achieve the prize, you have to work for it, move patiently forward just like in life. Have you ever noticed how much nature mirrors the lessons we need to learn in our own lives? Like a raspberry thicket, sometimes we have to reach into something thorny to find something wonderful. Yes, you’ll have some scratches along the way, but as it turns out it’s worth it.
I discovered long ago that God has a lot of messages for us in his creation if we’d just open our eyes a bit. He’s there in a raspberry thicket waiting for you to find Him. Risk a little of yourself and reach in! You never know what sweet reward awaits you.
At the end, I packaged up several packages of berries per customer, far more than the goal of one package each. I hope they enjoy them. Despite my thicket wounds, I enjoyed picking the berries for them. But mostly I enjoyed marveling at the amazing design that is the prickly raspberry patch. What a sweet reward, indeed.
(Wild roses intermingle with our raspberries, and they're blooming right now. I should have picked some of the roses, too, but I took a picture of them instead.)
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