Picking red raspberries up on the Allegheny Front. Quite a switch from the more common black raspberries that Mom and I have been concentrating our berry-picking efforts on for the past week and a half, which signal ripeness by color change. With red raspberries, you have to kind of gently pinch them and see if they’re ready to let go. The dead ripe ones drop at the lightest touch. And they’re even sneakier than the black raspberries, bending canes down as they ripen so the best berries are often well hidden from above. They seem to be expressing an evolutionary preference for dispersal by small, ground-dwelling critters such as toads and turtles. Which makes sense, given their preference for wetter sites.
There’s a common yellowthroat up here with a distinctly different accent from the ones back home—ten miles away. Ours go witchedy-witchedy-witchedy, while this one goes liquidity-liquidity-liquidity. Truly a message for our time.
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Many people don’t know this, but round about midsummer, some of the younger sassafras trees dance together at sunset.
What they do after that has not been recorded and is best not inquired into.
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Already half-full, the sneaky cup. Already russulas up, with bites taken out of them. Already the first black gum leaves are beginning to turn.
Already half-full, the moon passes through a heart that turns into a tree, then disappears behind a giant grey mouse, re-emerging just below its tail. As Dave Barry used to say, I swear I’m not making this up. Except of course I am. They’re just clouds. The moon has nothing and everything to do with us.
The first true katydids! So early.