Picking Berries Now And In The Past
I’ve decided there is one good thing about having rain almost every day in Iowa. That thought came to me while I was picking red raspberries. The vines hold plenty of berries this year for me, the birds and raccoons. My patch is attached to the field fence behind my garden which is close to the house.
This morning’s pick had me thinking about the 1950′s when Mom used to take my younger brother, John, and me to the blackberry patch in the pasture about a mile from home. That was in southern Missouri near Schell City. That was a hot job and tiresome job. We would get a cool spell about the time the blackberries bloomed. We called that blackberry winter. Problem was, the cool spell didn’t last until the berries ripened so we had to pick in the heat.
Drummers, which you know as salesmen, used to go door to door more than they do now. Some of them Mom liked to see come. She didn’t shop much, and it was convenient to have the salesmen come to her. One was the Watkins salesman. Mom liked Watkins vanilla flavoring to put in her angel food cakes. To sell Mom a larger bottle, the salesman convinced her that the flavoring was good to keep away chiggers if rubbed on the places chiggers liked to harbor. So with blackberry picking in mind, Mom bought a bottle.
Early every other morning in summer heat, we started for the berry patch just as quick as Mom and Dad finished milking and the other chores. We hoped to beat the hottest part of the day. Before we left, Mom took a few minutes to prepare John and me with the flavoring. We had to wear our straw cowboy hats to protect us from the sun, a long sleeve shirt to protect us from the briars and our rain boots with our pant legs tucked in to ward off bugs and snakes. With all that, we were hot before we started and smelled like sugar cookies.
We walked down a lane between two fields that the milk cows ambled down twice a day, going and coming. When we reached the pasture, Mom warned us not to get near the creek. One of the cows had a big lump on her neck from a water moccasin snake bite. She was drinking in the creek when she got bit. The poisonous bite didn’t kill the cow, but she felt miserable for awhile. Once in a while, we would see a black snake or a grass snake. Sometimes, a copperhead sunning near where we walked. John and I knew without being warned to watch where we stepped. We’d get excited when we saw a snake and moved faster.
Dad was a story teller, and he didn’t mind stretching the truth. I suppose that is where I’ve gotten my love of writing books. As long as I’m writing fiction I can stretch the truth as much as I want. One evening, he puffed on his pipe as he claimed a neighbor had just told him about a black snake as large as a man’s arm. A farmer mowed the tail off the snake when he was mowing his hay field. The snake had been seen by others in different pastures close to our farm, standing up on his flat stubby end. Dad said the snake was tall enough to look a man in the eye. The thought of coming face to face with that black snake in our pasture that was taller than we were didn’t exactly make John and me eager to go berry picking.
The patch was on the far side of the pasture. Each of us had our own bucket so we scattered out around the thicket. The bugs were different back then. Long slender ones with hinged necks made popping sounds. We called them snapping bugs. Large gray bugs smelled bad when we picked them out of the pail so we called them stink bugs. Today I kept brushing away spiders. Had one go up my long sleeve shirt and had to turn the sleeve wrong side out to get rid of it. I didn’t see any small, black beetles today which is good. They like to eat anything sweet. Usually when my berries are gone, they burrow into the sweet corn ears. Mosquitoes buzzed around my ears, making me wonder which of them might carry one of the viruses talked about on the news. I don’t remember mosquitoes on hot, sunny days in the Missouri blackberry patch. Too dry there.
Mom called buying groceries doing her trading. The reason for that was most of the berries we picked, blackberries or strawberries, Mom took to Dickbreder’s Grocery store and traded for supplies. She bought just what she had to have; sugar, flour and coffee and paid the difference.
My mother canned the food we couldn’t eat fresh. We had an icebox for years, and finally we had an electric refrigerator with a very small freezer that held a couple of ice trays and a package or two of meat from our meat supply at the Meat Locker. Though I can vegetables, I’m lucky to have a large freezer that holds all the extra berries and vegetables when I don’t want to can. Having today’s conveniences makes preserving the food we raise a lot less work than in my mother’s day.
