Just about this time of year, the kids on our street all went berry-picking, for black raspberries mostly, and red raspberries if we could find them. The red raspberries were tastier, harder to find, and more likely to contain those little white worms, and they also tended to fall apart when picked. So we kids mostly pursued the black raspberries.
First we had to come up with some sort of container, not always easy back in those days, pre-plastic age pretty much. We knew what the ideal would be, as portrayed in pictures, a dandy little metal pail with a handle, but none of us ever had anything like that. Sometimes we would find used berry cartons, those made of that thin wood, or we would borrow a bowl from our mothers, an old bowl of course.
We would head for the fields behind our house, and sometimes venture several fields up, into the wooded areas where bramble bushes like to grow. Occasionally a few of the boys would cross the road and follow the tracks up the road a piece--to---hey, where my house is now. The main drawback to that was the old woman who'd homesteaded a plot of land near the track. She claimed everything in the vicinity as hers. She had a shotgun and wasn't afraid to use it. If the berry pickers got too close to her trailer, there would be shots fired. Even the daring little boys learned to stay on their own side of the tracks.
If the picking was good, there was always the opportunity for us to sell our berries from a cardboard box in front of our house, placed in view of the customers to Sara's store. The price was $.25 a quart.
The berrying itself was quite rigorous.The day would be hot, our shoes would get wet from the natural springs that kept the fields soggy, the bugs would be out-mosquitoes, gnats, spiders, and others though we never saw a tick; they apparently hadn't been invented yet. So we would be hot and sweaty, with wet feet and insect bites, but that wasn't the worst of it. Scratches from the berry bushes were. The best array of berries were always deep beneath the tallest bushes, which had the sharpest thorns. Our arms and other parts bore scratches throughout the berrying season. We didn't care; we expected it, though the intense itching and pain from the ever-present nettles was a definite negative. The most traumatic happening of all was losing the contents of our container as we reached to pick and stray branches attacked us in the process. Even sadder was the trip home with a full basket when we spilled our berries climbing over the several fences on our way back.
Now it's easy. I have a blackberry bush growing at the back corner of my house, a red raspberry bush near the shed; I even have a blackberry bush growing out of a hollow in the tree in my front yard. But,
Alas! There's nobody to go picking with and no sitting on our front porch afterward, drinking soda, comparing our scratch wounds, and discussing how our profits might be spent at the Schaghticoke Fair.
