The raspberries which ramble over the steep inclines along my walk are finally ripe. They are a curious hybrid with a slightly different leaf- less toothy than the one I’m familiar with- and before the berry appears, you get a fuzzy, furry calyx which looks prickly but is quite soft to the touch. Then that splits open and unfurls and inside are the juicy scarlet berries. Last year I had to fight off invaders. Not the deer or the bears. They come at night and are deserving. But other people who don’t hike the hills every morning and watch and count the days like I do. Fortunately they seem fewer this year and not as ready as I am (stroller notwithstanding) to climb down into the ditch and pick berries. I got enough yesterday for Lucy to gorge, and for both the kids to have some for tea. She arrives home with her lips and cheeks stained bright pink and sticky splotches on her bare legs. She does not share with anyone.
We picked another bagful today, but not enough, alas, to have with a dollop of cream.
Today I also found another Luna moth. This one alive but fluttering along the road trying to fend off a wasp. I brushed the wasp aside and the moth clung to my finger with its furry red legs so I picked it up. One wing was torn. On the other, the long curving segment was tattered. It sat on my finger, with its feathery antennae vibrating. I was sure it would die while I looked for a birch tree to leave it on but it didn’t. My hopes are that it will survive and find a mate in the short time it has left but that seems doubtful. Imagine living your whole life in a two week span? I’d work out my directives (because my brain responds to order) and I would go with my gut instinct. There’d be a lot more prioritizing and deciding what is truly most important. And probably a lot less messing around—at least the kind of messing around that brings no real joy. There’d be more of the good kind. In fact there’s a good chance that everything I would do in my last two weeks would fall under that heading.
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