What’s in a name?

A Bowl of Raspberries. I had been contemplating this blog for a few weeks, but put off creating it for lack of a name. Many things can stall in the absence of an appropriate beginning. Then a couple nights ago, sitting on the couch with my husband and cat sharing a true summer delight, the answer was right in front of me: in the form of tart, luscious black raspberries, picked a few days before, sprinkled over and swimming through silky vanilla ice cream.

A bowl of fresh raspberries and Breyer’s vanilla (or plain soymilk) is one of life’s simplest and most unbelievable pleasures. Every year is as good as the first time, because in the meantime, you forget just how amazing it is. The first sun-warmed tomato is like that, or the first time you discover a new, unusual food that’s been prepared really well.

Fresh raspberries, like any good produce, are a guilt-free indulgence. An indulgence that, when it volunteers wild in your backyard with no needed maintenance the rest of the year, seems like a ridiculous gift.

My grandma had huge red raspberries growing behind her farmhouse outside Rockford. I can still feel their smooth, somewhat dusty-feeling flesh, covered with fine hairs, as I picked them. They were so big they could easily fit on the ends of my fingers and thumbs. Of course, that was probably relative to the size of my thumbs at the time. No store-bought raspberry will ever approach their taste.

A big bramble of black raspberries has thrived year after year in my dad’s vegetable garden. I don’t remember if anyone planted it. In fact, it has jumped locations over the years, a true living colony. It starts to ripen just around the fourth of July. Picking a big bowl of these raspberries in the morning to have with breakfast, or in the summertime dusk, is one of my favorite childhood memories. (Sugary cereal isn’t the only thing that can turn the milk colors. Crushed black raspberries turn it a vibrant purple.)

After the BP oil spill happened (and continued to happen) last summer, Garrison Keillor wrote a column that appeared in the Tribune editorial section. It provided some solace – another thinking, caring person, expressing a shared sense of despair and frustration. He did the only thing he could think to do, in the face of our self-destructive behavior, indifference to the natural world, inaction on environmental problems, and cynical politicking: He sat in his yard, watched the Mississippi go by, and ate a bowl of fresh raspberries with ice cream.

I can’t say what he felt after that. But what I felt was that if such simple pleasures tied to the land are still possible in our world, then all is not lost.

At the bottom of a bowl of fresh raspberries, picked by hand or from the market, is comfort and a feeling of contentment. A feeling of family, community, and continuity. At the bottom of a bowl of raspberries maybe is hope. And all of that is what this blog is about.