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Our friend Pete brought wild blackberries to dinner last Thursday. He had picked them himself, and they were fresh, washed and cold, presented in a well-used yellow ice cream bucket and covered with wet paper towels.
We ate outside in the shade of the walnut tree, some 25 of us, at our annual dinner for Mennonite writers. First we ate taco salad with a dozen ingredient choices, then browsed the dessert table, dishing a scoop of Pete’s berries on our plates beside Sheila’s galette and Yvonne’s cookies. Small children grabbed berries by the handful and ate them with deep enjoyment, ringing their mouths and smearing their hands with purple, and dropping extras on the grass.
Despite this, when the sun had set, the conversations had ended, and the guests had left, at least a quart of berries remained. I eat them for breakfast with homemade granola.
August is the time of abundance, and it leads to emotions from glee to guilt to gratitude.
I’ve made three trips to Bear Fruit, situated on the winding dirt lane a mile or two past Detering Orchards, to pick blueberries that hung so thickly on the bushes that I could stand in one spot and fill half a bucket. Since they offered a free fourth bucketful if you picked three, I lost myself in the wild plentifulness of it all. In addition to eating handfuls of berries for days, with childlike joy, I gave away freshly washed berries, froze them in little bags, and made jam and crisps and cobblers.
Out in the garden, the tomato plants, fertilized by chicken manure and old straw, have grown to four feet high. They sprawl over the neighboring rows like gangly teenaged boys asleep in too-small beds. Meanwhile, the dahlias grow taller by the day, their hundreds of buds opening in an explosion of color and perfectly creased petals.
I turned my back on the zucchini plants for about two days and found monster squash silently waiting under the leaves like hidden submarines about to leave on a secret mission. What do you do with that much zucchini, especially since the quality fades as the size increases?
One of these specimens has been showing up around the house disguised first as Paul, my husband, on a living room chair reading a fat James Michener book, with glued-on googly eyes and a bag of pretzels beside it. Later it posed as me, in the kitchen by the cookbooks, with glasses on its nose and wearing an old pair of garden sandals.
The humor is plentiful these days, and the pots of tea, with an adult daughter home for part of the summer. In addition, my husband and I just reached 41 years of marriage, a wealth of growth, care and faithfulness. Friends have been abundant as well, with connection and coffee and conversations.
This season always makes me think of my Grandma Miller sitting at our Midwestern kitchen table and raving about the fresh fruit in Oregon. “Mommi’s” family lived near Amity for a few years when she was a teenager, moving back to the Midwest when her restless father decided Oregon was too far from everywhere else.
“Ooooh, the unfagleidlich fruit in Oregon!” she exclaimed in German. “You never saw anything like it! Blackberries free for the picking, a cherry tree in the backyard, peaches and apples and pears! It was like the Garden of Eden.” In our Minnesota kitchen, we listened and tried to imagine such abundance. Then we stemmed and washed the strawberries we had driven an hour to pick, or we cut up the apples that were decidedly smaller and sourer than any in the magical land of Oregon, according to Mommi.
Like Mommi, I do not take abundant fruit for granted. Our eight years in Northwestern Ontario, in Canada, early in our marriage, were even more deprived of fresh fruit than my Minnesota childhood, so I will never be blasé about a nearby fencerow full of blackberry vines, ripe with purple berries, free for the taking, and more than I can ever pick.
My gratitude comes from recalling times of not enough, of wishing for more, of not reaching around, and unfortunately of feeling like I somehow didn’t deserve more.
Maybe you need to experience poverty before you really appreciate wealth, and seasons of scrimping, counting and doling out small portions before you know the joy of grabbing by the handful, knowing there is plenty for everyone.
Surely the times of miscommunication and loneliness make you see the gifts in relationships that work. You also learn that abundance requires not only seeing what is possible and available but also taking the effort to grasp, pick and process. It also means giving thanks and being generous, because that, rather than guilt at your good fortune, is the only sensible response when you figure out it’s not about what you deserve but what is freely given in a season of blessing.
We plan a trip to Crater Lake to celebrate our anniversary, taking along containers of trail mix and fresh berries to eat on the hike down to the lake and back up. We will not be taking any zucchinis, but will let them grow as large as they like while we are gone. It’s August, after all, the time for joy in outrageous and oversized abundance.
