How to pick a serviceberry bush
The last time we discussed the berries, Robin Wall Kimmerer had published her phenomenal essay, but not the book-length expansion that became an instant bestseller. I was in a bookstore near my partner’s home, and there it was: a stack of The Serviceberry, with a flock of customers poring over it, asking questions, talking to the clerk about it, just in time for, uh, November. I didn’t bother confessing to them that I have a literal serviceberry tattoo, or a twelve-foot bush in my backyard, that the whole book was materially written into my brain years ago. I said I read the essay, it was good, they should read it. Kimmerer is the kind of author with such deep magic that you must slide her work across the table with no explanation. Read this, you say, which is a complete sentence.
But it is now June, and June is serviceberry season, where I take long swaths of my job off to fight birds and pick a bush clean. Then I spend more time picking other bushes clean that happen to be in the public way.
Learning how to pick a serviceberry bush involves learning the system of the thing. It fruits basically randomly, and more come in by the hour. Some berries look ripe but are not ready to jump from the bush quite yet; others are unripe, but fall right off; still others give easily, but with stem, a sign that your berry gave up on you. Discernment is necessary. Lots of berries get thrown on the ground. It’s best to pick each berry one by one, but nobody has time for that, and a pinch where you can get three whole berries at once feels like you’ve won the lottery.
Berries hide. They hide under leaves and under other berries. Change your perspective on the bush and the whole space shifts: a riot of purple in the same place as before. You learn acceptance: what berry gives, what berry does not, what berry reveals itself, what berry decided to get eaten by the birds.
The birds always win. They have more time and drive than you. You sleep. You go out on the weekends. You have your own life to live. You pick berries elsewhere and there they are, feasting on your “own,” only they are never really your own, they’re just berries, belonging to everything and nothing.
Your friends pick them. They pick them when they’re at your dinner party. They pick them when they’re eating lunch in the middle of the work day. They find a bush in a median strip on the way to your home, pick it, then come over with an empty tupperware and fill that.
You pick 17 pounds of berries, eventually, and make jam with them. The jam is three ingredients – berries, sugar, lemon – and it is, by some margin, the single most coveted item that you make in your kitchen, which is really saying something. You hand out jars at your biggest party of the year and people burst into tears of gratitude. There was one year where there were only three jars of jam. Last year, there were 26. There stand to be more this year, but who knows.
Lots of people know about serviceberries now, which is nice. They mention the book and talk about abundance, which is nice. But it’s really about taking care of each other. Every time someone stops me when I’m picking berries in public, they ask what I’m doing, if those are edible. I always give them a handful. They light up: “wow!” And yeah, wow.