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

wall of the garage. Sue grabbed one end as I took hold of the other. “It’s not so heavy,” I said, shifting the ladder from hand to hand to get a comfortable grip. A meticulously folded, clean white sheet sneaked from the linen closet in the hall balanced between us on the edge of the ladder. Empty paint cans we used to collect eggs or pick blackberries hung from our belt loops, ready to be filled with all the mulberries we would collect.
    When you’re 10 years old and your coconspirator is eight, you don’t notice that the trek from the house back to the pasture is close to half a mile over rough ground and mostly downhill.
    As we walked, the ladder banged against our bare legs, my arms began to ache, and my fingers grew numb. I shifted the weight from hand to hand. We carried the ladder on our right side; we switched it to our left side. I walked in front; then Sue took the lead. In spite of all of our machinations, by the time we arrived under the tree we had matching red patches on both sides of our legs. And my fingers felt as though they were going to drop off.
    “Wow,” I huffed a sigh of relief when we dropped the ladder under the tree. “That was heavier than I thought it would be.” I rubbed my sore hands down my equally sore legs. “Look,” I chortled, “I have black-and-blue marks already!” A visible testament to our adventure.
    “Yeah, me, too. But come on. Let’s get started,” Sue said, fairly hopping around with excitement.
    So we did. We tipped the ladder up, positioning it under the most promising looking branches of the tree and spreading the sheet to catch all the berries. Scrambling up the ladder, I shook the limbs. Some berries fell on the sheet; more fell on the ground.
    “Wait. I’ll move the sheet,” Sue said. “We’re missing too many.” She tugged the sheet here and there, looking back and forth from the branches overhead to the uneven ground below, gauging where berries would fall and roll. “Okay,” she stepped back. “Now try.”
    I shook the limbs again. More berries fell. Some of them hit the sheet; some fell on the sheet but rolled off on the ground; many didn’t hit the sheet at all. I came down from the ladder and we gathered up the corners of the sheet to channel the berries into our bucket. Some went in the bucket; some rolled back onto the ground.
    We peered into the bucket. Many of the berries were green. How is it that green berries fall off while ripe ones cling stubbornly to the branch? Can you make a pie with green mulberries? we wondered. We didn’t know for sure but we didn’t think so. Maybe with enough sugar?
    This wasn’t quite as slick an operation as we’d thought it would be. We stared. All that effort to get a cup of berries.
    “But I want a pie.” Disappointment filled Sue’s voice and her eyes glistened.
    “We’ll get enough,” I tried to convince us both. “We have to keep at it. Come on. Let’s move the ladder.”
    Together we wrestled the ladder under another part of the tree and spread the sheet again. This time Sue climbed up to shake the limbs. Mulberries rained down on the sheet and ground. “It’s okay,” I said. “We can pick up the ones from the ground.”
    We fell to our knees picking up berries out of the deep grass. The little piles of berries in the buckets grew though we stepped on just as many. Our fingers, our knees and the soles of our feet resembled the blotchy purple spots blooming on the sheet.
    Every couple of minutes we peered into our buckets. Certainly not the bountiful bucketfuls we had dreamed of. When we figured we had enough, we folded up the sheet, collapsed the ladder and began the hike back to the house. Uphill. That old wooden ladder weighed more with every step.
    By the time we struggled back to the yard and stowed the ladder in the garage, our hands were scraped red and the sides of our legs were a mottled black-and-blue mess of bruises. But we were back and ready to forget all the hard parts.