Berry picking, and I don’t really care if there are stink bugs on them, always drew my attention, even when I was a snot-nosed kid of 10. If a berry showed up, even a tomato-like ground cherry (an elegant nightshade} or a prickly dew berry on the sandy open fields of Marquette County here in Wisconsin, I ate ‘em. Just plopped them in my waiting mouth as if I were a hunter/gatherer back in the day, you know twenty thousand years ago when my people were drifters.

I suppose it was my Old Man, though born in New York City and raised in Chicago, was always doing it as if he too was just out Africa following his Cro-Magnon genes. Hell, he’d even chew on wheat grass grains. As a result my parents foraging habits, if it was a thimbleberry up north and a half, a wild raspberry, a cantankerous blackcap, into my young mouth they’d go. “Hey kid, look at these huckleberries.” We’d scarf ‘em. It’s never changed.

I’ve got the grandkid doing it now, just like our kids did, and he hunts them down like a Neanderthal looking for a noon meal of grubs and berries (an old favorite I am told). “Hey gramps there’s a bunch of gooseberries in Merlyn’s front yard. What should I do?” He looked at me as to imply the neighbor didn’t know about it and he had a hankerin’. “Better ask.” I said with lifted and twisted brow.

A person can only hunt and gather so much in these modern times, so this last summer, our raggedy troupe hit the commercial berry patches and secured one hell-o-a-lotta berries, big puppies and froze those suckers up. That is why today, in a cold-adverse state, I made a pie. To top it off, part of the sweetener I used was some freshly made maple sugar. Sweet Jesus skipping across the tundra on a rubber crutch, that pie was good.

I know this was not done as if we were still hunter-gatherers, but it was still by our own hands gathered from the land. That is my thought for the day on keeping it simple. Just remembered we had ground up northern pike a few days ago, and the squash Jake grew. Life is good in the slow lane.