picking elderberries

Late of July they always came.  A couple in a car, parking on the roadside, quickly quietly cutting off the small branches of elderberry off the bushes. Many bushes and shrubs grew along the roadside bordering the farmers field.

Some years he did not see them, there in the distance, filling their pails with berries. He knew, they took the fruits and made pie and jelly, possibly wine. It was good. The farmer remembered his wife doing such things.

Early every August the farmer would sit in his kitchen and silently cry for his long dead wife.  His children gone, he carries on, farming his land.

One year the couple did not come for the elderberries.  The farmer knew when the birds carried the berries in their spoor to his driveway, leaving the evidence for him to find. He wondered, briefly, what happened to that couple and the little girl they brought with them. 

Later that same year he went out by the road and cut down all of the bushes and shrub growing there.

Many years later the child grew her own elderberries. Late of July she could be seen, driving her lawn tractor past the massive elderberry bushes, reaching out for a handful of the berries to eat. This made her supremely happy.

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i miss my elderberry bushes