Mulberries

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We have two mulberry trees in our yard where we live in south Louisiana.

Our trees are bearing fruit now, overflowing with it, the smaller tree literally bending over to one side, like it’s bowing to someone, its hands (branches) touching the ground.

The supplicant mulberry tree

There are three kinds of mulberry trees, I learned—white, red and black. Ours is red, Morus rubra, with the red fruit ripening to deep black. The ripe black fruit looks like an elongated blackberry. It’s firmer than a blackberry, but, despite the similarity, the species are not related. Its taste is subtle or, less kindly, hardly exists.

The tree in front of our house, the smaller, has by far the most fruit, is the most fertile. We’ve picked it at least five times, and it’s still heavy with fruit. We—well, my wife—has made mulberry jam, a mulberry crumble and has frozen many mulberries from these harvestings.

Ripening mulberries from our tree

We’ve picked them often with the little girl who lives next door, a Cajun girl, seven years old. She adores my wife and comes to our house every afternoon after school to visit and stay as long as we’ll allow her. She will negotiate that departure time with us, trying, as it gets dark, to eke out a few more minutes if she can with highly inventive pleas. She loves helping my wife clean, cook, paint—anything.

And pick mulberries. The other day, we spread a tarp underneath the larger mulberry tree. I got on a ladder and shook the branches, so the ripe berries would fall, making it easier to glean them. This delighted the little girl, whose job, self-declared, was to gather all the fallen berries into the middle of the tarp. We will miss her dearly when we go away for the summer.

Our dog, Manon, surveying the mulberry tree in our back yard

The other day I read some words by the U.S. poet laureate, Ada Limón. She’s compiling an anthology of nature poetry by American poets. She said that these poems “make me want to pay attention to wherever I am right now, to look deeply at what’s around me, and not miss it.”

So it is with mulberries and picking them with my wife and the little girl next door. I never had mulberries in my life before I moved to this rural area of Louisiana. The tree’s range is wide, though, covering most of the eastern United States. I’m not sure why I never encountered them before, but there you are.

Ripe mulberries fallen to the ground in our back yard

So I think of Ada Limón and what is around me. I see mulberry trees and the fruit they bear.

Trees bearing fruit. A reliable event. Perhaps. If I’m really aware of what’s around me, though, I have to be aware that mulberries may not be in our future, the way things are going. Last summer in Louisiana, the heat was horrible, like living in magma. Every single day during the month of August, it was 100 degrees or above—one day reaching 110 degrees. That heat, combined with the debilitating Louisiana humidity, was too much. We hardly went outside the entire summer. Some of our trees could not withstand that furious assault and died.

Not the mulberry trees, fortunately. For now, at least.

My mind wanders when I consider this. I think about the people I know who are basically accepting of whatever happens with regards our imperiled environment. “What can I do to make a difference?” one person said to me. “It’s probably too late anyway.”

How do we know if it’s too late?

I will die, and with that, there will be no more mulberries and mulberry picking for me. That does not mean, though, that there will be no more mulberries and no more mulberry picking for the little girl next door. I fervently hope there will be.