The Fruits of Rose Park

Kids usually prefer fruit over vegetables.  I was no exception.  In Rose Park, we actually had quite a variety of fruits available to tantilize our palates and tempt the fate of parents discovering unsupervised consumption.  We had strawberries, raspberries, apples, apricots, peaches and plums.  One good thing about the variety is that the ripening dates spanned late spring through early fall.  We had sporadic opportunities through the outdoor months to sample the fruits of the backyard.

My favorite fruit from the Rose Park home was raspberries.  As a small child, maybe four years old, my Mom sent me out with a small pail to pick some raspberries.  After 20-30 minutes, she called me to come in.  I had five or six raspberries in my little pail and red stains around my mouth.  "What did you do with the raspberries?" my Mom asked.  I held out the pail, proud that I had picked raspberries for her.  "Oh dear!" she exclaimed.  "You weren't supposed to eat them all!"  I hung my little head, but still loved every one of those delicious berries I accidently popped into my mouth.

The strawberries were just outside of the back porch, on the southeast corner of the glossy green house.  Those strawberries just begged to be picked and eaten as I walked to and from the backyard.  Strawberries were special because they were the first fruit that ripened, a few weeks before the raspberries.  They were small and sweet, very different from the large, crunchy, relatively tasteless strawberries we typically find in the store these days.  It would take me a number of years to understand why those little ones by the back porch tasted so much better than the ones from the store.

The fruit trees provided not only fruit, but trees to climb and scale and to set afire the imaginations of children.  One summer day, before the apples were fully ripe, my brother, Dave, my sister, Penny, and I set out to construct a communication device between the apple tree and the plum tree.  We got two tin cans and used a nail and hammer to punch a hole in the respective can ends.  We used string with a button on the end to connect those cans.  We had heard that the can phones would work better if you rubbed a bar of soap on the string, so we did that.  We had a grand time talking to each other on the can phones.  Even with that fun, I was distracted by the green apples in the tree where I was stationed.  I picked one to eat.  It was hard and sour.  It made me pucker.  I was suprised it wasn't all that delicious.  Penny told me that if I put a little salt on the green apples, they would taste better.  She was right.  I'm still not a fan of green apples.

The fruit from the Rose Park house set me on a course to appreciating and antipicating fresh fruit.  Maybe on my farm, I can pick some fresh raspberries on my way back from the barn to go with my breakfast.