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| A mulberry fruit. Photos by Flickr/Jep. |
It's the height of summer, and the mulberry tree at the back of our house is filling up with succulent morsels of deep purple goodness. Every morning, I try to harvest all of the ripe ones within arm's reach and leave the ones I can't reach to the birds and to the annoying neighbor's chicken (or should that be the neighbor's annoying chicken - think I am just going to feign ignorance) when they drop to the ground.
My fingers are stained purple as mulberries tend to bruise easily when ripe, and you need to pick them carefully. This brings me back to another mulberry tree in a different place at a different time. I remember this mulberry tree in a parking lot where we were housed by my former employer. My colleague was ranting that he could not chance upon a ripe mulberry. He suspects that the grass cutters that maintain the grounds feast on the ripe ones every chance they can. It's a good thing my fingertips weren't stained purple when I plucked most of the ripe ones just that morning.
Another mulberry tree, another place, and further back in my childhood. There was a huge mulberry tree in my grandmother's place. My grandmother would make mulberry jams when they were in season. I didn't dare try to pick ripe mulberries, though. The tree will sometimes be populated by these worms that are suspended on almost invisible threads. A local species of silkworm, perhaps? We would sometimes visit our grandmother on her farm during summer school breaks. I remember the chicken coop where the eggs are gathered every morning. It was still her old house made of bamboo, coco lumber, and nipa leaves for the roof. There was no electricity, and kerosene lamps were the main illumination source at night. I remember sleeping on the bamboo-slatted floor with a banig (a Filipino handwoven reed mat) for an additional layer. The entire house is propped up on stilts and will shift with your weight. The crawlspace below the house is filled with these conical depressions in the sand, which I later learned are antlion sand pit traps (did you know that you can "fish" for antlions with a piece of string?). The highlight of our vacation would be a partial harvest of the fish from my grandmother's fishpond. She would have the water level reduced in one of the ponds to about waist level, and farm workers would drive most of the fish to one side using nets. And we would "help" with the harvest by trying to catch the fish by hand (I'm sure that is not how fish are actually harvested, and my grandmother would simply do that to entertain her city-dweller grandkids).
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