Last week I was in southwest Michigan where I have spent time almost every summer of my life. Numerous farmers’ markets are scattered throughout the area. These markets range from the twice-a-week market that rolls into downtown, featuring a variety of small organic and traditional farmers along with other non-farmer vendors; to the larger farm stands that are open every day along the state highway; to the simplest stands set up in front of various farmhouses, offering berries, tomatoes, corn, and other crops sold on a trust basis (since these smallest of sellers are busy working their fields, they don’t leave anyone behind to man the cash box).

Along the western part of the state, stretching along the entire length of Lake Michigan, is something that agriculturalists call the fruit belt. It’s an interesting agricultural phenomenon—250 miles long and about ten miles wide. In this stretch, a variety of orchards and berry farms supply a constant stream of delicious fruits from the first strawberries of May to the last apples of October, plucked before the first frost sets in. Agriculturists have a variety of theories for why this narrow stretch of land is so bountiful—the composition of the soil and the moderating force of the breezes off Lake Michigan make the fruit belt conducive for growing strawberries, cherries, raspberries, blueberries, peaches, pears, and apples.

That list notes the order in which the fruits appear. Each fruit has a short season—a couple of weeks for the berries, a slightly longer time for the larger fruit. My vacation came at the tail end of the raspberry season and as the first blueberries were ready for picking.

One day last week, at the height of the heat of the afternoon, I picked raspberries at Earl’s Farm Market. I spent about an hour there, and I thought about writing almost the entire time I was picking.

I made the connection because of the similarity in the two tasks—a solitary person working quietly for a concentrated period of time. Yes, picking raspberries can be a social event. When I was there, a mother was picking berries with her two children, both around age five. (I discovered years ago that five or six is the perfect age to pick berries with kids. Any younger and you spend more time making sure your kids don’t get lost or stung by a bee or become gorged on berries in a way that’s sure to have ramifications later in the day. Any older and they start to look at berry picking as yet another chore and there’s more eye-rolling at dad than berry picking.) This mom and her kids kept up a lively conversation about almost every berry they picked.

There also were about a dozen seasonal workers in the fields—these are the people for whom berry picking is a job, not an interlude in a vacation. These workers, too, however, kept up a steady quiet conversation with one other.

But mostly raspberry picking is a solitary task. A mature raspberry bush stands about six feet high. It has long delicate branches that for the most part cover the raspberries, which can grow at any point of the bush. At Earl’s each row of fruit has dozens of bushes.

Generally, berries will grow and mature in clumps of four or more. A clump of berries doesn’t mature at the same time. Picking ripe berries requires a bit of concentration, but as much intuition as anything. It requires a delicate touch—the fingertips, more than the eye or the nose, are probably the most important guide to a good raspberry.

A ripe, juicy raspberry isn’t necessarily the one with the most vivid color. A raspberry, at its ripest, will slide easily off the little stalk that holds it to the bush. It takes a while to get used to this—pick a raspberry that has a nice shape and vivid color, but that is clinging stubbornly to the stalk, and you have picked something that will give you a slightly sour surprise later in the day.

So the beginning of raspberry picking is a series of missteps; your little green box is likely to have a few sour mistakes at the bottom of it. Once you get into the rhythm of picking, however, you’ll get an increasing sense of satisfaction as you pick the right ones and ignore the wrong ones. Just like writing.

Writing can be like going into a raspberry field in the heat of summer. You have just a few basic tools—a pen and notebook; a computer keyboard—and a large field of possibilities. You start with a few missteps—whether you are writing a story or the next part of your novel or a 1,000-word essay, the first words you put down will likely be discarded later. You “feel” each word as it floats from your head to your fingertips, making an instantaneous decision as to whether it fits, whether it’s the right word. At a certain point, if you are lucky, the process becomes automatic—most of the words are ripe . . . I mean, “right” . . . and they just flow into your basket . . . er . . . onto the page.

At the end of the hour of picking, I had eight pints of berries. We ate most of them right out of the boxes over the next few days, but a few of them we froze, for smoothies or other things in the months ahead. Similarly, when I write something, I have the immediate enjoyment of a task finished, but the later satisfaction of seeing my words in print (or at least online) and the occasional appreciative note from a reader.

Postscript: Not to torture an analogy, but after I finished what I thought was the final version of this essay, I discovered another connection between berry picking and writing. At one point while picking, I clumsily dropped the pint box I was holding, spilling an almost full container all over. I salvaged the spilled berries as best I could, but some were muddied and bruised enough that I just left them on the ground. When I filed the first version of this essay, I inadvertently saved a version that missed the last three paragraphs. I salvaged what I could from memory, although, like the elusive perfect pint of raspberries, the perfect essay is often something we hold just in our imaginations.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he writes for pleasure. Over the last several months, he has re-read some of his favorite books and written a series of essays about why these books remain important to him, even decades after the first read them. Contact Paul.