Berry Pickin' Punk

Every July I look forward to picking the black raspberries that grow around my home. I like to have them with cereal in the morning and sometimes over vanilla ice cream. With coffee, naturally.

And every July I have to fight the birds for the black raspberries, especially the blue jays, who are the bullies of the yard bird world. But nothing will dissuade a berry lover like me. I pick them every morning for two weeks or more before they run out. It's the best two weeks of the summer for me.

Yesterday I had to, once again, flush out a squawking blue jay from the first berry patch. He didn't like it one damn bit when I called him a "berry-pickin' punk" but he left. I filled a styrene cup half full of lovely black raspberries and, after rinsing them in cold water, I enjoyed them over my multi-grain breakfast cereal. With coffee, of course.

The next day as I approached the berry patch with my empty cup and a big, bullying blue jay started giving me grief, I had a revelation. As if by some miracle, I was suddenly able to translate this noisy, wild bird's angry, squawking protest. I was dumbfounded. But only for a moment.

"You berry-pickin' punk!" it said to me in loud, blue jay squawks.

Touché, I said to myself, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I'd been dutifully chided and that I'd gotten the big picture. The sad, awful truth wasn't easy to swallow but I took my medicine. Here it turned out that, after all these years, I was the berry-pickin' punk all along.

When Chores Are Pleasures

There's a little spot of yard behind my garage that I named Gooseport, PA several years ago because of the two male Canada geese who used to live there all year long. The one I called Broken Wing was killed earlier this year by some kind of nocturnal predator and I only have one goose left now. His name is Big Mouth. But we call him "Mayor" now, the Mayor of Gooseport, PA.

Mayor (see pic) is eight years old and shares the summer pond with several ducks and a two-year-old female Canada goose I named Dipper (because she’s always dipping upside down in the water for food, more than the other goose, it seems). She left for parts unknown a week ago before I had a chance to snap her picture.

I feed Mayor cracked corn every day, white bread about twice a week and lawn grass, which I pick and put in an old Clementine box, about once a week also. His favorite meal is Italian bread without the crust.

Mayor paces impatiently at the gate when he hears me remove the metal lid from the corn barrel in the garage. Sometimes he almost pushes me out of the way as I fill the trough. But not lately. He misses both Broken-Wing and Dipper. I hope Dipper comes back before fall.

One of my morning chores is to trudge to the garage for cracked corn for Mayor and birdseed for the many wrens, sparrows, chickadees, cardinals, blue jays, black birds, etc. who know that, regardless of the weather, they’ll have fresh feed here to start the day.

Around this house animals are not referred to as “this” or “that” but as “who” and “whom”. And feeding them each morning never was much of a chore. In fact, it’s one of life’s little pleasures.