Black Raspberries and What Summer Needs to Be

Today I drove to the nearby home of one of my closest friends to pick all of her flowers. Why did I do this? Said friend is away for the month, and as she has one of the loveliest, professionally-installed and maintained gardens I have ever seen, it seemed a shame to me that nobody would be there to enjoy what was in bloom in mid-July. I told my friend in advance of my plan, and she shrugged; I suspect she found the whole proposition a little strange, but that's okay. I have two huge bouquets in my apartment right now: one of lillies, and one of wildflowers, obtained by wading through a mini-field of poison ivy.

But this is not why I am writing. It was something else in my friend's yard that triggered a pretty intense memory for me, something I discovered as I walked around the expansive backyard, enjoying the beauty and the solitude. At one end of the lawn, there are three wide rows of wild, overgrown greenery. My friend had asked my grandmother, mother and me to come over one afternoon in late spring to help her determine what was growing, and we had recognized the then brown canes and vines immediately. Fruit.

To see it at the height of mid-summer was something else entirely. Bunches of green grapes--which will hang heavy and purple come fall--were everywhere. Blackberries and raspberries, too--so overgrown that I scratched my arms again and again as I picked them. Apple trees around the outskirts of the rows. And then. Black raspberries.

The berries themselves are smaller than raspberries and blackberries. They are a very dark crimson, really, as dark and winey as it is possible for a color to get before being black. The "segments" are smaller as well; they resemble miniature raspberries, a little, but taste less sweet, more tart than raspberries, much less sweet than blackberries, which they don't resemble at all. I have never seen them for sale anywhere, not even at the famous farmer's market or countless gourmet groceries near my home in New York.

As I stood in front of the first patch I found, I noticed that my hand had curled involuntarily by my side, as though to hold a glass. And in fact, on the summer mornings 30 years ago when my sister and I walked out into the field in front of our house to pick our own black raspberries, we were holding cups: translucent green ones, with red apples etched onto them, our regular drinking glasses, made of a thick, light plastic, though, not glass.

The berries grew in a bramble where the field met the road, about halfway up, and many, many mornings we would walk together to pick, sometimes through waist-high, dew-damp grass that had yet to be cut and transformed into cylindrical haystacks, other times on sun-parched, clean-smelling, newly-shorn grass that left wisps on our legs and our brown little feet. On a good morning, we would each get half a cupful or so--like all berry pickers we ate while we picked--enough to make my mother's famous blueberry muffin recipe with the black raspberries instead of the regular blueberries, which we also picked, often, but which did not grow wild.

The black raspberries were ours. The land they grew on, actually, was not. It belonged to the aforementioned inn, which had fired me as an assistant groundskeeper after less than one day, but nobody else ever picked them or seemed to know they were there. We had discovered them, we picked them, we ate them; they were ours.

And standing today in my friend's backyard, I closed my eyes and tried to see me and my sister in our summer nightgowns, holding our green plastic apple cups, pulling each berry off of its little nub and watching the pile grow higher and higher. I ate a few berries, and the taste--a little dusky, a little bit complicated--came back to me, too, reminding me of how summers used to be: me, my sister and the infinite expanse of a day, from the wet grass of just after dawn to the wilting hammock mid-day lounge to the rounding of the bases between the little groves of fir trees as the sun fought for one last hour and ultimately lost to the way the stars look lying on your back on the cool night lawn.

As a child, I understood summer implicitly. Now I need a little help sometimes. Thank you, my friend, for sharing your flowers, but also for the push to remember.