The Sound of Moving in the Mulberry Trees

It's Marvelous Monday and our mulberries are ripe! Their sweet purple juiciness is something I look forward to all year-round. It's hard to explain why mulberries are so special to me.

I think the birds have a good idea without me saying a word.

And I know that my siblings completely understand.

But I'll try to put it into words so that you, too, can understand. We grew up on a fruit farm. As kids we knew we could eat any and all the fruit that we wanted, but primarily, the fruit was there for us to sell. It was our family business and our family depended on that income to survive. So we ate fruit like little piggies, but we also worked hard picking baskets of sweet cherries, peaches and plums, quarts of strawberries, bushels of grapes and apples, and wooden crates of sour cherries and pears.

When you're a kid and it's hot outside, picking fruit can seem like an endless day and a horrible chore. Looking back, I think we had idyllic childhood summers where we ran barefoot and free, feasting on the goodness of the earth with the frequent addition of huge bowls of ice-cream. I can close my eyes today and nostalgically conjure up in an instant the amazing taste of a fresh juicy peach warm from the sun, with it's tangy honey flavour and think to myself that it is truly indescribable. But back then, I was covered in itchy peach fuzz and sticky juice that had a way of insidiously creeping into the inside creases of our elbows, playing havoc with heat rash on a hot, humid summer day. And it didn't seem so grand.

Except - the mulberry tree. Our mulberry tree was the one tree on our farm that wasn't part of the economic equation. We didn't pick its fruit to sell for the family business. It was ours, all ours. Although, if we wanted to, as kids, this was one tree from which we were allowed to pick fruit and sell if we wanted to make some money to keep for ourselves. But mainly we just picked the mulberries for us, to eat fresh or to make mulberry pie, mulberry jam, or mulberry cheesecake.

Our mulberry tree was quite close to our house, not out in an orchard, lined up with other rows of trees.  Often in the evening after supper, we would all gather around the mulberry tree and have dessert. It was hot in our old farm house and we had no air-conditioning so by evening, it was actually considerably cooler outside.  The tree was big enough that we could all find a spot to eat and not really be in each other's space. We would gorge ourselves on mulberries until our mouths and hands and t-shirts were covered in purple.  It was a little slice of heaven on earth.

My dad pulled out the mulberry tree a number of years ago because it was putting too much shade on his strawberry patch. He figured since all of us kids had long moved out, nobody would mind. We were horrified! The sacred mulberry tree was gone. I think my dad has regretted taking it out from pretty much the moment he did it. Even the next generation down was upset as my oldest nieces had already started to appreciate the mulberry tree and all it had to offer. For years I would walk by the space where the mulberry tree had been, and shake my head in grief at its loss.

So, can you imagine my delight when I visited my husband's house for the first time and discovered this?

A gigantic mulberry tree! Bigger even than the one we had, this beauty was planted by my father-in-law who adored mulberries. How wonderful to discover that my husband's family had the same love for mulberries as mine! I love that my siblings and nieces now eagerly await my phone call to let them know that our mulberries are ripe once again.  When I walk out of my house at this time of the year, I never know if I might find one of my brothers with two or three kids tagging along, standing under my mulberry tree happily eating.  And when my husband comes home from work, he doesn't come into the house right away.  Instead he stands under the tree for a while and has a mulberry feast as an appetizer for his dinner.  Even my dogs love the mulberries and if will either graze on the ones that fall to the ground or jump up to pick them with their mouths from the lowest branches.

























So today, on Marvelous Monday, I am so thankful for our mulberry tree.  I've never been sure what it refers to in the Bible but I know that the "sound of moving in the mulberry trees" in our case, is the sound of joyful feasting, either of humans or birds or animals, all happy to enjoy the fruit of a wonderful tree.

An Archeological Dig in my Garden

Yesterday when I was planting our garden, I came across a selection of broken china shards that have surfaced since we last cultivated.

It reminded me so much of when I was a child and would spend hours playing outside in the summer. One of my favourite "games" was to play with all the pieces of broken pottery and china that would turn up every time some part of the farm was tilled. This was especially true of the garden closest to our house.

I loved to play with each piece of china and imagine what it had been in its previous life - a tea cup?  a dinner plate? I would spend hours making designs with the broken pieces - temporary mosaics that changed at a whim. And then I would try to imagine the very first person who owned the china and wonder what they were like and what they served to eat on the china. I think this is probably where I started to fall in love with fine china. And now, years later, I have many lovely (and unbroken!) tea cups, plates, etc. to play with.

And yet, still, when I came across these pieces yesterday,

they caught my fancy in a way that the cherished fine pieces that fill my china cabinets don't quite do. These two pieces look like they might have come from a plate. They are fairly heavy china and remind me a bit of the kind of plates that were used in old diners. Perhaps they belonged to my mother-in-law. I wish she was still here so I could ask her, because my husband is not likely to remember. He will remember a delicious meal in complete detail but never notice the plate it is served on!

It's probably partially caused by nostalgia for my childhood, but I still think there is something special about found china pieces. I think the mystery of the broken pieces is what attracts me ... I know that they were once something of beauty, treasured by a household and if they could speak, they would tell me the story of where they have been and whose lives they have touched. Which inevitably leads me to wonder who will find my pieces of china one day down the road? Will they turn up in some garden hundreds of years from now, shiny surfaces and colourful prints hidden beneath clumps of dirt?

I hope someday that my china will give another little girl great joy. That she will find the pieces and play with them, solitary games that fill her with a sense of beauty and of history, and teach her to love vibrant colours and delicate prints they way I do.  It almost (almost, but not quite) makes me want to leave a codicil in my will, that all my china be broken into pieces and discarded rather than leaving it intact to sit unused and bored on a cabinet shelf, when it could be scattered like seed in a garden, waiting to be found.