I'm sad that the raspberries are done for the season. Sure, they're still for sale in the store. But in our yard, in the sunny southern patch we opened up during our kitchen remodel for the express purpose of planting these canes - they're done.
A raspberry in my mouth ranks among my favorite summer pleasures; right off the vine, even more so. Yet for me, the gastronomic pleasure has become the least of it.
Every time I approach the tangle of green in this corner of our yard to pluck its scarlet fruit, I think of my dad. Every time the berry releases into my fingers and travels to my mouth, I feel my father's presence.
Fifteen years ago when my vigorous brainiac father was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer at the age of 63, I cast about for moorings. A friend who'd lived through the death of her young father was one who threw me a line. She told me that her dad would make himself felt from time to time, a powerful felt-sense washing over her, more than a memory.
During the 18 months from my father's diagnosis to death I spent part of each week at their home off a gravel road on the Kitsap peninsula near Washington's Puget Sound. I lived with them the last summer of his life. The home was built into a hillside with a large garden cascading down the slope. My dad and stepmother had planted fruit trees, built raised beds for veggies, scavenged old tires for blueberry beds. They put in rows and rows of raspberries.
Every day during that last summer I went down to the raspberry beds and picked and ate, picked and ate. From the vine to my mouth, not stopping in my palm or resting in a bowl. I don't remember bringing any up to the house, though I imagine I did. What I remember is gorging myself, feeding something beyond hunger in my daily pilgrimage to these bountiful bushes.
A raspberry in my mouth ranks among my favorite summer pleasures; right off the vine, even more so. Yet for me, the gastronomic pleasure has become the least of it.
Every time I approach the tangle of green in this corner of our yard to pluck its scarlet fruit, I think of my dad. Every time the berry releases into my fingers and travels to my mouth, I feel my father's presence.
Fifteen years ago when my vigorous brainiac father was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer at the age of 63, I cast about for moorings. A friend who'd lived through the death of her young father was one who threw me a line. She told me that her dad would make himself felt from time to time, a powerful felt-sense washing over her, more than a memory.
During the 18 months from my father's diagnosis to death I spent part of each week at their home off a gravel road on the Kitsap peninsula near Washington's Puget Sound. I lived with them the last summer of his life. The home was built into a hillside with a large garden cascading down the slope. My dad and stepmother had planted fruit trees, built raised beds for veggies, scavenged old tires for blueberry beds. They put in rows and rows of raspberries.
Every day during that last summer I went down to the raspberry beds and picked and ate, picked and ate. From the vine to my mouth, not stopping in my palm or resting in a bowl. I don't remember bringing any up to the house, though I imagine I did. What I remember is gorging myself, feeding something beyond hunger in my daily pilgrimage to these bountiful bushes.
Earlier this week, as I officiated the funeral for a woman who died at the same young age of 65 as my Dad, of the same disease that took my friend Marcy, just up the hillside from where we buried Marcy, I shared these words by the great Irish poet John O’Donohue, on remembrance:
Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows,
And music echoes eternal tones.
Dad, I feel your presence in many moments. And always, always, at the raspberry canes.
My last post about my father links to the other writings I've done about him and his death.
Let us not look for you only in memory,
Where we would grow lonely without you.
You would want us to find you in presence,
Beside us when beauty brightens,
When kindness glows,
And music echoes eternal tones.
Dad, I feel your presence in many moments. And always, always, at the raspberry canes.
My last post about my father links to the other writings I've done about him and his death.
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