Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl by Carol Bodensteiner Read Free Book Online

them down with one hand as we skimmed the juicy mulberries into our palms and scooped them into our mouths. The saliva of desire formed in the corners of our mouths as we strained to pluck berry after berry, swallowing them almost before we could taste them.
    Once we’d stripped the low branches clean, we flopped on the ground, gazing up at the even bigger, even juicier, berries beyond our grasp. So many mulberries!
    “I bet we could easy pick enough for Mom to make a pie,” Sue said.
    “Mmmm. Pie,” I hummed. For several moments, we drifted off into thoughts of Mom’s pies.
    We always had dessert at dinner and supper. Usually pie—that or Mom’s special ice water chocolate cake—or ice cream—or ice cream on cake—or ice cream on pie. Always dessert. Often pie.
    From time to time when Mom put a pie on the table, Dad would claim that he taught her everything she knew about making pies. While she didn’t deny that, we never saw him rolling out the dough that turned into flaky, melt-in-your-mouth crusts.
    Rhubarb pie in spring when the green/red stalks shot up with their big floppy, elephant-ear leaves. Peach pie when Dad brought a couple of lugs home from the store for Mom to can. Cherry pie when the Fareway got 20-lb. cans of frozen berries. The occasional, rare gooseberry pie when we happened upon a bush in the pasture with tart green or sweet deep purple berries ready to pick. Mostly apple pies because we had lots of apples and they froze well. Complete, unbaked pies Mom made and stacked up in the freezer ready to pop in the oven over the winter or to take to a funeral or an auction. A lemon pie only once that I remember—Dad didn’t like it. Banana cream, chocolate cream, coconut cream pies with toasted, fluffy meringue. Every single time Mom made pie with meringue, she claimed it was watery or pulled away from the crust or was too brown. Every single time, Mom said Edna Hoffman made a better meringue. But I loved how the meringue dissolved in my mouth like sweet air. It was all fine by me.
    And mulberry pie, only in the spring. As Sue and I looked up at those branches loaded with berries and sucked the sweet juice off our purple-stained fingers, we figured there just could not be any kind of pie better than mulberry for today .
    “Pie would be great. If we could find something to stand on, we could do it,” I suggested, scrambling to my feet. “And we could make a basket out of one of our shirts.” We looked for a fallen tree or rocks or something we could use to boost us a foot higher, but found nothing.
    “I know,” I said, dropping to my hands and knees. “Stand on my back. See if you can reach the branches.”
    Stepping gingerly up onto my back, Sue wobbled as she balanced and reached up. With a yelp, she lost her balance, toppled off, rolling into a ball as she tumbled to the ground. “I couldn’t reach them anyway,” she admitted as we caught our breath laughing.
    Suddenly Sue sat up, her brown eyes sparkling with excitement. “I know. We could get a ladder. And if we laid a sheet on the ground, we could shake the tree, all the berries would fall off and we could just roll them into a bucket.”
    “That would be great,” I agreed, jumping to my feet. “We’d have enough berries in 10 minutes. And we can make it a surprise.”
    Just like that, we took off for the garage. As we raced up the lane, we could already see a fresh pie, hot from the oven, with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream melting on the side.
    Getting a ladder was not such an outlandish idea. From time to time, we carried a ladder a hundred yards up to the mulberry tree along the fence by the mailbox. Technically it was Miller’s tree, but branches draped over the fence, dangling so many fat black mulberries in front of us each spring that we came home with stained hands, shirts and mouths. The lure of a fresh mulberry pie sent us on that quest at least once a year.
    In no time, we’d wrestled the wooden stepladder off the