Summer

 Summer

Heading down the driveway on my morning dog walk, the sky grey with a misty drizzle of rain so light it almost wasn’t there, the air fresh and cool, my mind wandered to the time many years ago when my friend and her Mom came over to help pick mushrooms. I had no clue which mushrooms were edible so I definitely needed and appreciated a guide. We tromped all over the bush picking the small ones, the larger ones tended to be wormy they said. Since we picked way more than needed in one sitting I decided to dry them, strung them up like popcorn on a Christmas tree and hung them up in our south kitchen window. Slowly they shrunk, giving their moisture up to the sky, filling the kitchen with a musky odour while dropping a surprise by-product on the windowsill below - crunchy desiccated worm carcasses! So I got out my whisk broom, scooped the bodies up and deposited them in the trash, put the now worm free mushrooms into jars to use in soups, and never really got around to picking mushrooms again. 

In the “the good old days”, when our farm was mainly bush, when I was young and had no garden yet, and before we had goats and sheep, I spent hours harvesting berries and tea leaves from the bush. I carried my wee son on my tummy or on my back in his green Snuglie pack. It was like a turtle shell, you could barely see him. I would lay my little turtle on a blanket for a nap and pick blueberries. Highbush cranberries drew me to their bounty by releasing their unique scent. I picked raspberries, wild strawberries, some gooseberries and hazelnuts. There was peppermint below the beaver dam and Labrador tea in the muskeg to the south. Gathering this wild bounty was a mixed pleasure. In those days there were so many more bugs than there are now. I remember being literally chased out of the bush by masses of tiny flies and mosquitoes. Then for me, with my totally undeveloped sense of direction, there was always the possibility of getting lost. Since it was just baby and me I used to mark my trail with bits of brilliant orange tape to ease my fear. I never really thought about bears much except for making sure I was noisy by singing and “conversing with my companion.

But times change, priorities change, and after 50 years of occupancy our little plot of land has evolved to become fairly “civilized “. Now we garden and cut grass, lots of grass since we no longer have sheep to keep it under control. I rarely harvest wild berries. The tame raspberries this year were incredibly abundant, filling my freezer until I had to juice and can many pounds of them to make room for half a pig. The peas grew well; the tomatoes, to date, have produced nothing but leaves. The cucumbers planted in the corn row may produce, their leaves are huge and they’ve got lots of flowers and some cukes forming. They are climbing the corn stalks but it’s crowded in there, hard to see what’s going on. I think next year I’ll plant them in sunflowers instead - fewer low leaves. The corn is tall, tasseled with cobs forming. All in all it’s been another good summer with plenty of rain. It’s been an action packed season with many social gatherings and winter preparations. Now I look forward to autumn when all the summer work is done and I can walk my dogs down our yellow “brick” (fallen leaves) road.