Wednesday’s Child: Round the Mulberry
“A paradise can only ever accommodate one person,” says Andrea, a Sicilian of uncertain occupation who spends most of his time in Australia. “Imagine sharing it with someone like me.” It’s eleven in the morning, and a breeze is blowing from the sea. We’re drinking local Agrigento red on a stone bench by the house and, strange as this may seem, I don’t mind sharing this paradise with him or any other house guests. Despite his tattoos. Despite even his periodic attempts to switch the conversation from Russified Sicilian Italian into Italianate Australian English.
Speaking of the breeze, we don’t get that in Palermo, facing as she does the Tyrrhenian puddle of a sea. Here, just above the level of our wine glasses, it seems, is the whole of the Mediterranean, practically an ocean in comparison, and the breeze coming over the transom is a practically an ocean breeze. It is cool, steady, and somehow ponderous, bringing to mind the term “heavy water,” and if you are sitting in the shade it feels like you are floating in one of those sensory deprivation tanks that are filled with a saline solution at skin temperature. Another way of simulating paradise, I suppose, and likewise not a naturally communal experience.
The ostensible purpose of our visit to this corner of Agrigento is to pick mulberries, but my wife is the only person here disciplined enough to have taken the proposition seriously. Yesterday I picked for half an hour without putting a single berry in the basket, and got a stomach ache for my trouble, while she delivered to our host some six kilos. This we divided between two jars, one to be made into a cordial my way and the other the host’s way. I add sugar and leave the fruit to ferment for a few days, whereupon the fermentation is arrested with the addition of alcohol, while he pours in the alcohol immediately and adds the sugar later.
A mulberry tree is a magnificent thing. Van Gogh painted one in the autumn, and the picture is now in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, but you have to see it in summertime, with the berries on like Christmas tree decorations. They are an inch long, the unripe ones pink and the ripe ones black, and when you try to pick one of the black ones which is even a tiny bit underripe it explodes all over your face, your shirt, and, most infuriating of all, your shoes. “You look like a professor from something by Ionesco,” said my wife. “Like you’ve just murdered your pupil.”
Anyway, paradise, and a perfectly cooked pasta with clams to make it all the more plausible. The host allowed, nay, encouraged me not to change, so I ate and drank in my mulberry murderer’s clothes. The breeze was still there, pumping heavy water into our isolation tanks, ruffling hair, making napkins fly, and the guest from Australia was telling something about the Anangu or some other aboriginal tribe being an inspiration to anarchists.
It was like the happy humming of a bumblebee. Surely one wouldn’t mind sharing a paradise with a bumblebee?
When I was a child, our neighbor had a large and fruitful Mulberry tree. We spent a lot of time climbing the tree and eating the fruit. Though, I recall the neighbor warning against eating too much of the fruit. Around the 4th of July, a farmer friend of mine packs glass mason jars with blueberries from the farm and sugar cubes, then fills the jar to the top with gin or grain alcohol. He seals it and turns the jar over once a week. The brew is ready to drink on Christmas Eve.
Baltimore Orioles seem to like Mulberry trees and their bright orange color a great contrast to the black fruit which they manage to consume without linen napkins wrapped around their thin waists. They build a hanging basket type nest that is beautiful and sturdy to even violent winds such as tornadic winds and those more civilized, like
Eurus,
Notus,
Zephyruss and all their kinfolk. Thanks for the weekly child.
Robert–Thank you for bringing back a favorite memory of mine–the Baltimore orioles that nested in a tall poplar at the northwest corner of the front yard (overrun in the summer with sandburs; I can feel the sting of their barbs even now) of my family’s home while I was growing up. There were no mulberries around that I recall, though I think I remember mulberry jam, which had to be homemade; at least, I don’t recall ever seeing a Smuckers jar of it.
O, to be in Sicily, now when the mulberries fruit! Or at just about any other time, for that matter.
Could be, Ray. Could be, if my wife and I spend January and February in Agrigento, could be we could arrange a program. Let us talk about it in Rockford.
Ray, you are very fortunate to have those memories. I remember the sand burrs in western Kansas pheasant hunting because they were hard enough on the dogs I purchased boots for them but never in Minnesota. Of course I always hunt up there in December when snow has covered everything and it’s so frozen you can walk the marshes and cat tails/ cane patches without a worry about falling through. Even sand burrs must stay below ground in those winters and to be honest, I don’t blame them!!