Wild raspberries [9/100]

Every summer, the woods around my parents’ place would ripen with wild raspberries. Friends and family would come over with colanders and pots and we’d take them to the raspberry bushes by the field to pick as many as they could.

Raspberries you buy at the supermarket are sturdy and matte and have a mildly sweet flavor. Wild raspberries you pick are shiny and explode with sugary tartness.

When it was just me and my brother, we would go deep into the woods to find the brambles that other humans hadn’t gotten to yet. Once the berries were ripe, they would be bright red and detach easily. Once the berries were over-ripe, they would turn a dark juicy plump magenta, and they would almost fall off into the palm of your hand when you just touched it. Those we almost always ate right off the plant because well, they’re delicious, and also the skin was too delicate to survive jostling with other berries. Those were the best ones, but they were hard to find because the forest animals usually got to them first. Sometimes if you knelt down — or were naturally short — and looked upward or at odd angles, you could find whole bunches of dark magenta raspberries ready to be picked and eaten. Like this:

We’d come home from the woods with our ankles covered in scratches from the thorns. We’d check for ticks and then head in to show off our bounty .