Consider the raspberry. A quirky envoy from paradise, no doubt, but all the sweeter for it. 

The haps of climate change have brought us days and nights warm out of season, with only a touch of frost to date, so I forage in our berry patch out back.

What with homeowner neglect of the canes, it’s been a scanty summer and fall for the little, lumpy, juicy red fruits—but in their sparse numbers they just keep coming! On November 4 I found enough of the little darlings to brighten my oatmeal for a couple of days. 

Raspberries grow all over Northern Europe and North America. One of my best memories is of a long train ride in Sweden, when the train took a siding somewhere north of Uppsala to let another train pass. We were to be idled for about half an hour, so the conductor let us all off to stretch our legs. Some sharp-eyed boys spotted a huge mass of bushes in the trackside ditch—bushes just bursting with ripe red raspberries. We made the best of it, reaching through scratchy canes over and over for little flavor bombs. Students and professors, housewives and mechanics, bemused American tourists and Swedish children, all climbed back on board with smiles on our faces. We did not all speak the same language, but raspberries are an international lingua franca.

The Norwegian word for raspberry is bringebaer. It’s so common in Scandinavia that you see it everywhere. They have Nordic specialties like bilberries, lingonberries, and cloudberries, but regular old raspberries are the great staple. Breakfasts and smorgasbords are freighted with heavy bowls of bringebaer siltetøy—raspberry jam, festooned with myriads of little yellow seeds.

Raspberries were given by God as a delivery system for the seeds that bring more raspberries. The berry is composite, an agglutination of about one hundred spherical drupelets, each bearing and feeding one seed. Do the math: a hundred raspberries equals about ten thousand seeds. 

Maybe the seeds account for the roughness—“rasp”—that people associate with these berries. Or maybe it’s the thorns which adorn their stems, scratchy obstacles through which you must plunge your hands again and again to gain the prize. Even with thorns and seeds, it’s a prize worth having. 

Raspberries are red, but they also appear in black, purple, and yellow varieties. They’re all good. I think I like the flavor of the red ones best, but when I was a kid we had a patch of black raspberries, and they were—how can I put it?—exotically, almost sinfully delicious. 

Their raspyness may also account for why “raspberry” is a synonym for that mouth business otherwise known as a Bronx cheer. It’s a compound noise, with little clicks piled on top of one another, like the drupelets on a bringebaer, or the stickers on its stem.

I can give you no better wish, Dear Reader, than lots of raspberries in your future. You’ll have to excuse me now, while I go brush the seeds out of my teeth.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

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