Another Berry-Picking Essay

In which I hardcore bury the lede

If you’ve been hanging around me for any amount of time, you already know I’m obsessed with berry-picking. I’ve written about it before. Multiple times. I go often enough in the summer that my friends (rightly, kindly) make fun of me for it. As I write this, I’ve already gone thrice in one month. I have plans to go again tomorrow.

Every time I go, this is pretty much the vibe the whole time: joy almost to the point of perplexity

What is it that keeps me coming back? It’s not (just) the berries, which I regularly can’t make it through on my own — such that I have to give them away to friends or freeze them or make them into cobblers or muffins or, as I did this year, jam. (It is really fucking killer jam.)

Frankly, it’s closer to church-school. Every time I go berry-picking, I get closer to myself; every time I go berry-picking, I learn (re-learn?) something. Recent lessons include:

It’s sweeter when you have to work for it. Who wants to pull a pre-picked pint from the fridge when you can get your hands dirty, juicy, ever-so-slightly thorn-pricked? There is no better flavor on earth than a sun-warm berry that was, seconds before, still attached to the vine that grew it.

If you’re not finding what you’re looking for, change your perspective. Hundreds of pickers comb the rows at my favorite farm every day. And yet: If you crouch down, push the leaves aside, are willing to reach your hand in deeper, you can find the ripe opportunities that others walk right by.

Timing is everything — and everything has its timing. If you have to pull too hard at a raspberry or blackberry, it’s not going to offer the sweetness you’re after. Better to leave it, to move on toward one that’s ready. That berry’s time will come, even if it’s for someone else.

If you try to have everything, you won’t get anything. I still so often try to grab fistfuls of berries at once, only to have them slide through my fingers to the ground. Slow down. Pick one berry at a time and put it in your basket (or your mouth). Appreciate the richness of each individual fruit, its tiny perfect structure, a little universe somehow built simultaneously to nourish you and sustain itself.

Speaking of the fruits of one’s labor…

I sold my book. :)

I sold my fucking book!!!

I may tell the full story here another time, but for now, suffice to say that every single one of the lessons above applies.

The short version: The memoir I started writing in 2019 will be an actual, physical, buyable book in Spring 2028, printed by Buckman Publishing. I could not be happier to partner with this incredible team of people I deeply respect and trust to bring this work into the world as the best possible version of itself.

(Oh yeah, and I also just published another essay with them in SHED, the most recent edition of their gorgeous, art-filled print journal, which you can purchase here.)

I hope everyone is summering sweetly. 🍓🫐