Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Huckleberries

Photo Credit: Rebecca Johnson

The view to the back of us as we pick our huckleberries.
I have some huckleberry bushes in my yard on the lower level and to the east side of the lot. Glen rides by them on the mower and every year he tells me when they are ripe.

He also suggests that I take some grandchildren there to eat them.

Today Betty, Alice and I went to the bush. Betty is not an adventurous eater so she gathered some to take to her mother to see if she wanted to cook them. That doesn’t mean she would eat them. It only signals that she was doing her duty with the berries.

Alice wasn’t hooked on the taste until about the 10th berry and then she was like me: all in.

I ate until I didn’t need any supper.  I didn't share with more people than the two little girls who went to the bush with me.

Tonight, two adults asked me if I had bruised my face somehow when I was out working. Since I had been looking at the purple stains on my thumb and the first two fingers of my hand, I was pretty sure that what they were seeing was the mark of gluttony on my face: huckleberry juice that had been swiped across the right side of my face by a lingering digit that was stained deep blue.

When I get more bushes, I will share more widely.

For now, just Betty, Alice and I will know where the bush is.

Arta

2 comments:

  1. I should have taken a photo of your deeply stained finger and thumb. Priceless.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have been looking at my hands lately. "When did they get old?" I am not the only woman to have thought that.

    I wear gardening gloves all day but the dirt is still deep around the cuticles and that is after they have been in the dishpan for a long time. I try to rub it out when I am a passenger in a car and have time to just think about my hands.

    But most of the time I keep them busy, sometimes mixing dirt: one part gravel, one part clay, one part black soil that I had dumped in a pile many years ago. Glen said I would use them and I have. I notice that the raspberries could use more soil just at the half-way mark, but it is raining today, so my hands will get a rest from mixing dirt.

    As to taking pictures of them. In pictures I should be hiding them behind my back since I am pretty sure not all will understand why they look a little beat up.

    ReplyDelete

If you are using a Mac, you cannot comment using Safari. Google Chrome, Explorer or Foxfire seem to work.