Set Adrift On Raspberry Bliss

They woke me right the fuck up.

Heaven bless the community garden. This time of year it’s a living metaphor, the harvest ready to be reaped and enjoyed. Hubz and I take weekend walks in our local, and right now it’s giving major zucchiniosity and pumpkinity. Also tons of beans, and clumps of rosemary, lavender, mint and sage, and some weird black tomatoes that look like bruised testicles (what do they taste like, I wonder?).

People work hard on their garden plots, and it’s customary to ask if you can have a taste of something before picking it. But oh lordy, the other day I broke the rule, and I don’t think I’m sorry.

What the hell is that? Hubz stopped near a bright green bush covered with something that looked like beefy white grub worms. Oh my god. I hadn’t seen them in decades. The bush was quite large, and one of its hanging branches sagged over the fence and into the path in front of us. I lunged at it, shoving one of the grubs in my mouth. NOT A GRUB! It was a golden raspberry, and I almost fainted from joy.

The golden raspberry is not like the others. All rasps taste heavenly, but the goldens are exquisitely, almost acutely pleasurable. You get the normal tangy/sweet rasp flavor, but then something else blooms across your tongue, a kind of peachy-creamyness with a tiny note of marshmallow. Once you’ve tasted it, you can’t be unseduced.

Memory is a spiritual revivalist of the highest order, and we serve at the mercy of its whims. The first time I tasted a golden raspberry was down at the beach, near the house where I lived as a teenager in Vancouver. Although the waterfront was littered with blackberry and salmonberry bushes, there was only a single golden raspberry bush on the whole waterfront, and it was hard to find. But a friend’s older brother knew the treasure map. He came to fetch me on a rainy Spring morning, and I tried not to shake as I walked in his footsteps along the narrow, grassy path to the prize.

The boy, slightly shorter than I but thrumming with strength and sex, smiled large as he parted two big clumps of brambles to reveal the signature cream-colored berries, hanging low on their small green bush, each one dusted with rain and its own nectar.

He plucked a few and handed them to me. I turned away, shy shy shy, and pressed them onto my tongue. The boy’s voice said my name a few times. I know what you’re thinking!! The soft rain, the secluded, verdant spot, the pure sex of the boy and his gift. But I was still too young, only fourteen, and the scene was more than I’d ever hoped for, more than I could handle. I walked myself home and lay on my bed, doing that awesome thing girls can do to themselves, thinking of the boy while I did it.

The taste and timing of the whole incident came back to me vividly in the community garden. Since then I’ve been thinking that although I’m grateful for the time machine that memory provides, I want to make fresh new memories that are equally gorgeous, impactful and transcendent as the early ones. I don’t ever want to feel that those experiences are behind me. How best to apply this desire? Wonder can be summoned or stumbled upon, but never forced. Like friendship, like insight, like orgasm, you have to relax and let it flow right to you.