One of the advertised features of our old Vermont farmhouse when we purchased it almost 40 years ago was a patch of cultivated raspberry bushes at the back edge of the property, between a hayfield we do not own and a small parcel of woods that we do. Over the years the woods have grown taller and the raspberry bushes ranker, migrating out of the shade and into the field to get more sun. At present, more of them grow on our neighbor’s land than on ours, but I continue to tend the plants and pick the berries with his permission. That I have always given away more berries than I’ve eaten makes the change of ownership seem moot. I have always thought of myself as the caretaker of those plants. They are my raspberries in the same way that my life is my life and Earth is my home.
There was a time when much of the crop went into jam, beribboned jars that my wife, Kathy, gave to workmates and relatives at Christmas. I picked, she rendered. She left off jam making around the same time she became solitarily self-employed. Ever since, the greater part of the harvest has gone to neighbors along our road and, in bumper years, to the postmistress, the town clerk, and the road maintenance crew. I’m usually able to dispense two to four pints at a time, though I’ve delivered as many as eight with more than enough left over for our table. Because last summer had been especially rainy, many of the berries spoiled before I could get to them, but I still managed to give away nearly 30 pints while probably consuming almost a pint a day myself. I love all kinds of berries, so it’s not unusual to find me foraging in the patch like an old bear. Nor is it unusual to find evidence of an actual bear doing the same. We pick at different hours, so we are never in each other’s way.
When Kathy and I came to this house, our daughter was only a year old, still not walking but precociously verbal. My present forays are colored by memories of carrying her into the patch and placing a berry or two in her starfish hand as she exclaimed, “Rah, rah!” and then, “Mo!” Her mother would call out for me to “Push the berries!” as an antidote to the child’s chronic constipation, but there was no need to push. Although our daughter knew how to say no and gave regular demonstrations of the fact, she never said no to a raspberry.
My father had the same yen. He told me more than once that his idea of heaven was a raspberry patch. When he and my mother came up from New Jersey for summer visits, he would often go directly to the raspberries before knocking at our back door. I think of him, too, when I pick, hoping he is in heaven and finds it at least as full of raspberries as he pictured.
Raspberries are to the tongue what roses are to the nose and eye (and, in fact, are members of the rose family, not true berries at all). In addition to their exquisite taste and nostalgic associations with my daughter’s childhood and my dad, I love my raspberries for a number of reasons. Most are purely sensuous, though a few are symbolic as well. (Do I need to say so? Can you think of any profoundly sensuous thing that isn’t also symbolic?)
I love the way raspberries announce their ripeness by both sight and touch. Some fruits and vegetables can easily be picked before they’re ripe; unripe raspberries resist you, clinging to their stems as if to say, “Not yet.” The period of their ripeness is relatively short; they pass quickly from ripe to overripe and are even more quickly spoiled by refrigeration. Abundant as they are, they have about them an aspect of rarity, like rubies that will allow themselves to be admired but vanish in the jeweler’s hand. They resent storage and defy exchange; their charms are of the moment, a pleasure reserved for the timely forager. Long used to represent perishable beauty, roses are outdone by their edible cousins. Gather ye raspberries while ye may.
There is evidence to suggest that Paleolithic cave dwellers ate raspberries, and though theirs were a wild prototype of mine, the berries could not have been any less desirable and sweet. I feel an atavistic connection to my berry-picking ancestors, especially when bringing a berry directly to my mouth. To eat while picking is the ancient method; it is how we ate for millions of years, leaving our seedy stools behind us. Opposable thumbs, when they appeared, gave us an advantage over those creatures who could pick with only their mouths and beaks. We could pause, inspect, pick several berries at a time before devouring them. I’m seldom more aware of manual dexterity than when I’m berry picking. All my fingers are engaged.
I think of raspberries as the precursors of pills, in both the medicinal and the “White Rabbit” sense: utility and ecstasy compressed into something small enough to be swallowed in an instant. Their visual attractiveness, their convenience to our height and hand tempt one to believe that we were meant to eat them, that they can have no objection if we do. One might gather hallucinogenic mushrooms or dig clams with a sense of committing some violence against them, of appropriating by force or cunning what was never meant to be ours. Not so with berries or with aggregate fruits like raspberries. They are for us, food from heaven. Had the Israelites passed by raspberries on their exodus to the Promised Land, would they have needed manna or even gone after it when it fell? Would they have wanted to cross over Jordan if it had meant leaving their berry bushes behind?
Our raspberry patch is on a spot higher than our house site, and so I am always taking a short climb to get there, which also appeals to me. It’s not far enough to get my heart pumping, yet steep enough to let me feel my legs. To go immediately after dinner, as I often do—we like to have fresh berries with our chocolate—is to rouse a body lulled by food and wine. The abrupt shift to movement revives my circulation and calls for deeper breaths. It summons the word heady, which the berries themselves also do.
Hooky is another. I seldom feel more shiftless than when I take a break in our berry patch. I’ve wondered how much of my berry sharing is motivated by neighborliness and how much by a need to be properly busy, to do something more useful than getting my raspberry fix. The cherubim with flaming swords whose office is to guard the gates of Eden work second shifts as patrons of industry and commerce. Even a vacation they will turn into a job. Perhaps it wasn’t taste alone that made my father imagine heaven as a raspberry patch, a place where he could eat to his heart’s content without sweating for his postlapsarian bread.
This is not to suggest that work has no place in paradise. I can’t imagine a paradise without some form of it. Even before their exile from Eden and the accompanying curse of toil, Adam and Eve are placed in the garden to “till it and keep it.” The Hebraic implication of a difference between work and toil has always struck me as particularly insightful, natural to a people who had once been slaves. I would enjoy my raspberries less if they didn’t require some voluntary care. That takes two forms, one in spring and the other in fall, happily skirting both winter and the time when the raspberries are ripe. The caretaking would go more slowly with snow on the ground or berries to divert me.
In the spring I gather and burn all the dead canes from the previous season. Raspberries put out two canes, one with fruit and the other fruitless until the following year, when the bearing cane dies and the new one takes over its reproductive function. The plants would probably do fine with the dead canes left in place and might even benefit from their decay on the ground, but a cleaner patch makes for less obstructed picking. I’m always amazed by what a heap of canes I gather and by how quickly they burn. I like the sight of the leafless, reddish canes in the cleaned-out patch, the tidy look of them before everything turns lush and tangled again.
In the fall I rake some of our leaves and barrow them to the patch for mulch around the canes. My hope is that they’ll keep down the interloping weeds, though their effect in that regard seems minimal. Every year I wind up digging out at least a few burdocks. My guess is that the dead leaves’ best effect is as fertilizer, augmented by rotten apples falling from an overhanging tree and by the scat of foraging deer that eat them. I do no fertilizing besides spreading the leaves. Our yields are without complaint.
It’s astounding how much food can come from a very small space. We are perhaps even more astounded than our ancestors were, because our sense of the earth’s plenty is not so depressingly offset by all that nature can do to take that plenty away. We do not grow hungry waiting for our corn to ripen. We will not perish if a blight should take our beans. We have greater leisure to reflect on the sheer fecundity of the soil. There are days when the number of my berries, some ripe or ripening, others rotting from overripeness, still others out of reach or demanding too much effort to reach, can seem practically obscene.
Of course, the real obscenity is starvation. What person with even a moderately successful garden hasn’t mused that no one should be hungry in all the world? To think of heaven as a raspberry patch may be getting ahead of ourselves; there are days in high summer when my raspberry patch seems more like the exhibit table at the Last Judgment—all that damning evidence against us. We mortals could be so much more generous or at least have a little more fun. I’ve come to believe that the two are related, that fun and generosity are, in their best iterations, one and the same.
At the corner of the patch nearest our lawn, which I come to through a doorway in a cedar privacy fence, always with a sense of “passing over,” stand a few short canes of wild raspberries. Much smaller than the cultivated kind that grow in such profusion beyond them, the wild nubs remind me that my atavistic identification with Paleolithic pickers is something of an anachronism, like looking at a 15th-century painting of the Crucifixion in which the bystanders are dressed like Renaissance fops. It wasn’t until the fourth century of the Common Era, according to the Roman bishop Palladius, that raspberries were cultivated and presumably began their progress toward the bushes I call mine.
Given that the Romans were the cultural plagiarists of the ancient world, I’m inclined to suspect the date of cultivation is older. Raspberries seem to have originated in Asia, so their first cultivation could be as authentically Roman as spaghetti is Italian, both of them imported from an eastern source. The wild ones came over the Bering Strait with the first Americans. The ancient Greeks certainly knew about raspberries and even had a myth to account for their color. Supposedly the berries were once white until Ida, nursemaid of Zeus, pricked her finger and stained them red with her blood.
It’s hard to imagine the pricking and the bleeding without reference to the ancient belief that raspberries fostered fertility and the possibly no-less-ancient discovery that the leaves have medicinal properties that alleviate menstrual cramps. All of which raises the chicken-and-egg question of what came first, the myth or the medicine, an accidental experiment or the serendipitous intuition behind it. Does it seem more likely that a menstruating woman arbitrarily decided to eat raspberry leaves and deduced their salutary effect on her discomfort, or that she found herself with an inspired craving to eat raspberry leaves during menstruation? I suspect that the most accurate origin story begins with the berry itself, that just as reproduction, pleasure, and blood are linked in our minds, the appearance and taste of the berries echoed the association in our eyes and mouths, spreading significance even to the leaves. I don’t mean to disparage figs and pomegranates, but I can’t imagine a sexier fruit.
Some of the antique paintings we see have raspberry juice in their reds, and who knows but that a painter or two shared a few of the ripe fruits with their models. Or that the models blew their presumptuous employers one of those bilabial jeers known as raspberries in response. I’m prompted to blow one myself on learning that George Washington cultivated the fruits at Mount Vernon, since we can easily guess who did the actual cultivation, picking, and preserving, and it wasn’t Martha or George.
I hope the enslaved pickers availed themselves of the picker’s ancient privilege, eating as they worked, though those caught doing so may have been punished. The Torah forbids muzzling the ox who treads the grain (so that he can eat as he toils), but mercies extended to animals have sometimes been denied to human beings. The practice of having dogs run in place to turn the spits in hellish restaurant kitchens was eventually abandoned as inhumane, the emancipated dog replaced in some cases by a Black child. To be stained with raspberry juice, as my clothing often is in midsummer, is to be reminded that even our most innocent eating has been fertilized with blood. I’ve seen fair-trade coffee but so far no fair-trade fruits or berries in the produce aisles of my supermarket. And growing my own berries hardly lets me off the hook.
Whenever an activity or a place suggests paradise, something will call our fancy to task. Those angels with flaming swords never sleep. In the case of our raspberry patch, a vexing reminder came several years ago in the form of an infestation of Japanese beetles. I don’t recall seeing them when I carried our baby daughter into the patch. They arrived later and show no intention of moving on. I admit that the resulting devastation could be worse. Of the berries that ripen, the beetles do not ruin half, and those mostly on the edge of the patch that gets the most sun. In the shady understory of the bushes, I find plenty of unmarred berries hidden among the leaves. The beetles actually seem to prefer the greenery of the new canes, turning the hardest-hit leaves into a desiccated lace.
Then again, the devastation might be worse if I did nothing to keep the beetles’ relentlessly multiplying numbers in check. I hang plastic beetle bags with pheromone baits in proximity to the patch and patrol it once or twice a day with a bucket of soapy water and a spray bottle of the same, zapping those bugs I can’t whack into the bucket, my nozzle hovering over the leaves like an alien spaceship intent on the annihilation of the human race. There is something disquietingly human about the beetles, the way they like to lounge in the sun and spend all day eating and copulating, performing the latter in twosomes for the most part but indulging in more kinky combinations from time to time. They buddy up on a single berry, reducing it to a grotesque mash. At least they don’t bite and aren’t hard to kill. I suppose I could try a live-and-let-live approach. A Buddhist friend of Kathy’s came by one day and picked a beetle off a berry bush, intending to release it in some other place. Kathy promptly took the beetle from her hand and dropped it into a bucket of soapy water.
“Oh well,” the friend said, with good-humored nonattachment, “maybe he’ll return as something better.”
Suffice it to say, I am no more a Buddhist than my wife is, though all four of the Buddha’s Noble Truths strike me as eminently true. The source of all suffering is attachment. But is attachment ever absent from any form of human love? The Buddha could have managed so sublime a refinement if anyone could, but the god I worship is radically attached, fastened hand and foot, though forbidding his followers any violent defense of his person. Deficient in his teachings, I seem unable to experience love apart from a deep loathing of whatever would hurt or destroy the objects of my affection. Certainly I don’t love raspberries in the same way as I love my daughter or my wife, but the love-hate dynamic is the same. Spray bottles filled with soapy water are not the whole of my arsenal. If you come to destroy anything I love, and if I’m given the chance, I will hasten you toward reincarnation. Whether you come back as something better or worse is no concern of mine.
It occurs to me that with sentiments like these, I could well be reborn as a Japanese beetle. If so, I hope I taste a raspberry or two before some alien stalker lets loose a fusillade of soap. I won’t complain if a kindly Buddhist lady gets to me first.
I don’t know who planted the raspberry bushes I call mine, no more than I know who planted or cleared space around the enormous sugar maples that line our road. Our house is nearly 200 years old, an age that seems commensurate with the
largest of the trees. I suspect the raspberries might have come a little later, maybe even after our place had ceased to be what locals call the old Carter Farm. No matter when they were planted, they have almost certainly outlived their planters as they are almost certain to outlive me. I take comfort in that.
I think it would make a fine custom to have a berry bush planted by a gravesite, though I’ve never seen it done. Perhaps people are squeamish about eating anything from soil so near to putrefaction, or perhaps berry picking would seem too irreverent in such a somber setting. Myself, I love the thought of a mourner or a cemetery worker pausing by my marker to pick something sweet. Or of a bear venturing out of the woods and ambling between the monuments, guided by an unmistakable fragrance, a catbird leaving its seedy droppings in the place where Jewish mourners customarily mark their visits with stones. I would even admit the beetles. I am not one of those people who want “a big party” in lieu of a funeral; I will have all the customary rites, thank you, and I won’t object if you cry, but I wouldn’t mind a few raspberries ripening by my grave.
For a long time before my wife and I were pensioned or our parents left us any money, I thought of our raspberry plants as a form of inherited wealth. Isn’t all wealth in some way inherited, derived from labors in which we ourselves had little or no part? Even the first Rockefeller inherited his wealth from dinosaurs that roamed Earth millions of years before anyone thought of pumping oil. Possibly more than anything else I own, the raspberries clarify the threefold obligation of wealth: to care for it, to share it, and to enjoy it. Lacking even one of the three, we diminish our holdings. Not to care for them is to relinquish them to entropy and attrition. Not to share them is to turn them from a blessing to a burden and even a curse—to sink in waste and its decadent stink.
Not to enjoy them may be the worst fault of all, as pride is said to be the deadliest sin. The refusal of harmless enjoyment, except in an asceticism motivated by love, is almost always a sin of pride. I would go out to see the sunset but have better things to do, I am not so easily impressed as to go gaga over a sunset, I have digital devices that will show me innumerable sunsets and allow me to adjust the palette to my own liking—pride, pride, and more pride. To enjoy something in the moment for the sheer sake of it, without fuss or ostentation, is to be in the place where the minds of animals and angels meet, is to partake—I believe this—of Love’s abiding pleasure in the natural world.
And isn’t pleasure a part of what prompts us to share? The prompting can take suspect forms, even obnoxious forms, as when someone insists that we read the book he’s reading or drink the drink he’s drinking, as if his own enjoyment were impugned by anyone else’s refusal to gush over the same. But at our best, we respond to pleasure with a guileless sense of fellow feeling. The confirmation that the world is good makes us want to be good to others in turn. Sartre famously said that hell is other people, but I’ve never heard any depiction of heaven that confines its bliss to one. In paradise more than in any other place, “it is not good that the man should be alone.”
So I deliver my surplus berries to our nearest neighbors. I think by now it is more or less expected. It is what I’ve come to be known for. I’m the old guy who keeps to himself most of the year but delivers raspberries toward the end of July. I omit one widow who told me she’s allergic and two couples who grow their own, but I try to see that everyone else gets at least a pint. Households with children get two or three. The appreciation I receive is touchingly genuine, not the same as if I were foisting off zucchinis. I read somewhere that it is considered unmannerly among Japanese people to pocket someone’s business card without first examining it; a comparable sense of etiquette may prompt a few of my neighbors to sample some of the berries in my presence. “So delicious!” they’ll say. The kids are less decorous. Two young girls run into their back yard clutching one of the pints like an emptying spool of kite string. Their parents thank me on their behalf, and their toddler sister throws her arms around my leg and presses her face to my knee, probably not because of the berries—she pays no attention to those—but because this funny old man has brought a surprise to her house and made her sisters happy. Whether heaven exists or has any raspberries I can’t say for sure, though I’m told that in order to find out, I must first become like a little child.
