You see, my mother loved to pick berries. Actually my dad did too. My dad picked the blackberries and blueberries. My mom favored strawberries, red raspberries, and blackcaps. So berry season lasted through most of the summer. I remember when I was just a tiny child, barely able to toddle, my mother would pack a lunch in a basket and then she would gather my sister and me from our beds before the Arkansas dawn. We would drive out to the country to pick strawberries in the field. We picked quart after quart after quart of those big juicy berries for the owner of the field to sell to the market. Well, I say we. But really what I remember was sitting between those rows while my sister and my mom picked. I sat and played in the red dirt, and chased bugs and butterflies. On occasion, my mom would hand me a berry to eat. Not often because, as laborers, we really weren’t allowed. But those berries were a just reward for sitting in the stifling Arkansas heat. And at the end of the day, my mom would collect their wages and buy us a few quarts to take home, at a discount. That was her reward – enough pocket money that she could buy material to make us new dresses for church. That, and the magnificent strawberry shortcake, and jellies, and jams that she would make from those trays full of berries.
When I was seven, we moved “home” to New York. I wasn’t old enough to remember, but I had been born when my dad was a missionary in the Adirondack Mountains. We didn’t move back to the mountains, but to a farm near the homestead where my mother grew up – The Button Falls Farm. And it was there that I found out that my grandmother was even more fanatical about her berries than my mother. I can remember riding down the road in the car with the two of them and one would say to the other, “look over there, I see a berry.” The car would come to a screeching halt. Okay, not really, but the story needed some dramatic effect! Out of the car they would tumble. One of them digging through the trunk for something to pick into, and the other would go and “stake their claim” as if someone else would even notice the tiny little red dots in a field of green. In New York, the two of them rarely picked the large cultivated berries like we had in Arkansas. Here it was wild strawberries, each berry the size of the end of your pinky finger. How they even saw them while driving 50 miles an hour down the road I will NEVER know! But they would pick until every red dot was removed from that sea of green grass.
And then we would head home to take every tiny little stem off every tiny little berry so they could begin the process of making the aforementioned shortcakes and jams, and the added delight of homemade pie. It took a lot more of these diminutive little creations to make a pot full of jam, but they were like treasure in a glass jar. And this cycle happened every season. I think strawberries came first, then blackcaps and raspberries, and then blackberries and blueberries. One summer, right after “Little House on the Prairie” started airing on television, I remember hanging a sign over our pantry door that announced “Laura’s Kitchen”. That summer, I was Laura Ingalls Wilder on the frontier gathering berries and making preserves and fending off winter by “fixin’ rations enough to keep us from goin’ hungry.”
The red raspberries were few and far between and I think that made them more appealing to my grandma and my mother. I know they were the favorite for both so we tended to gravitate toward the other jams and jellies and let them savor the fruit of their labors. So I didn’t eat the red raspberry jam my daughter bought me until everyone had gone home after the holidays. Then one day I made some hot biscuits and sat down to the table. All of the memories of all of those berries and the hot summer days with my mom and my grandma came flooding back as I took a bite of that sweet, seedy mixture. I haven’t really grieved my mama’s passing from this life to the next because I knew the pain she was in and I was glad to know she was free. But somehow in that moment I felt the loss.
It was like my whole life with her was gathering those tiny little moments, those tiny little "berries", and preserving them in glass jars. And on that day shortly after Christmas this year, when I needed them most, I unscrewed the lid and poured out the sweet memories and savored them one more time. How sweet and delightful and familiar.
We live in a different time. Everything moves more quickly. We grab a jar of jam at the store as we are rushing through on our way somewhere. It takes more intentionality to stop and see the “berries” along our paths. I am thankful for the lessons I was taught in the fields. So I try. When I am spending time with my grandchildren, I look for opportunities to make the moments special – not with grand trips or expensive toys. Those make memories too, but we can’t always afford those luxuries. So I try to spend time. I remember those days in the field, even when I would have told you I was bored. I remember having time with my grandmother and my mother. And while I may not remember every little berry, I do remember the “taste” of those moments together.