The September issue kept me clipping: “Sewing group celebrates 150th” to send to friends as an inspiration for their church groups; “Growing food on granite,” with the Dominique chicken, for a friend who raises chickens near San Francisco; the story about the beehive art collective in Machias for when I visit there again; and, finally the Cranberry Report by Barbara Fernald, for the section about gooseberries-to save.
Most of the information about gooseberries was new to me and the anecdotes about people picking them were hilarious. Recalling how my mother had pointed them out and shown me how to eat them, I felt blessed.
When they were first spotted, we were walking up the dirt road from our cottage at Nickerson Lake (near Houlton) to the Lake Road and back down the next road over. The two little roads split about halfway down, but while together, they shared a hedgerow between them with wildflowers, currants, crabapples, and the unusual gooseberries. A few years later, the two roads were made into one for easier snowplowing and the hedgerow, with all its natural treasures, was removed.
Since then I have met no one who ever heard of gooseberries, but I did see some in a London open market once. They were over an inch in diameter and I thought, “Gross, unreal, how could they be so big?” It seems the British have cultivated them since the early sixteenth century, developing over 2,000 varieties. They were so common in Shakespeare’s time that he used the expression, “not worth a gooseberry.”
This berry has been described as having a unique flavor of its own beyond compare, as the most shade-tolerant of all fruit, and as being prized for eating out of hand when dead ripe. Barb Fernald and other island pickers are very fortunate.
Thank you for the great reading-and memories.
Byrna Porter Weir
Rochester, N.Y.