While preparing for Sunday's Thanksgiving feast, Hubbie brought me an unexpected treat: five huge vine-ripened raspberries. In October and well past the time when plucking fruit from the branches is usual.
It's no secret unusual weather has blanketed the globe this year (and, more subtly, over the past number of years). One of the longest, coldest and wettest springs and early summer than I can ever remember drowned our vegetable garden. Although it was replanted, few things reached their potential.
A total of six vine-ripened tomatoes graced our salads but a harvest of green beauties finally turned red in the kitchen. Somehow the potatoes managed to produce the biggest crop we've had from a small plot so there will Yukon Gold aplenty this winter. The cucumbers produced well, aided by the late summer sunshine, but the strawberries yielded only enough for the occasional handful of succulent fruit and the enthusiastic pickings of our two-year-old granddaughter. It was the raspberries, though, that outdid themselves.
Raspberry vines bent low beneath the weight of these Rubus idaeus gifts of the garden. Raspberries on ice cream, raspberry-filled flans, raspberry-pureed coulis over angel food cake and dozens of containers of raspberries frozen for those same treats this winter. But raspberries in October? It was one of those unforeseen blessings that brighten even the best of days.
Sometimes we really need a blessing to brighten a difficult day. It's easy to enjoy culinary delights in summer's warmth but it's in the dead of winter that we long for the taste of fruit plucked fresh from the vine. It's in the winter of our souls that the goodness of God refreshes most.
"I would have lost heart unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living," Psalm 27:13
