A berry happy apply birthday

I spent my 37th birthday wild harvesting fruit with my family and friends. I feel fortunate and privileged to have made the acquaintance of some amazing women who know the locations of all sorts of prime, seasonal, free, edible plants, and I am enjoying mother nature's bounty in this plentiful land called the Willamette Valley. We drove caravan style around the highways of Veneta and Walton, which lay between Eugene and the coastal city of Florence, mostly in the wooded, coastal mountain areas. Lara seems to have a nack for spotting golden apples, pears and deeply colored ripe berries from a distance, and pulls us over at the perfect picking spots. She also comes armed with super-neato tools, like a fruit grabber basket thing-a-ma-jigger at the end of a long pole, perfect for short people who want to reach high spots without ladder. Even Reya had a go at the picker-on-a-pole technique, with great pride and some difficulty. I wish I had a picture of that.
The apples are simultaneously sweet, small, snackable, bakeable, and will store well, hanging in a basket in my basement that isn't quite a root cellar, but has potential.
We found blackberries that grow low to the ground, with a different leaf shape and less thorns than the invasive and violently sharp (seriously- you should see the gash under my thumbnail from trying to pick them)Himalayan variety that have taken over my yard and every disturbed or available piece of earth in the entire valley and beyond. These gentler wild berries seemed somehow sweeter to me, as well.
My favorite part of the trip was the elderberries. I fell in love with the beautiful bushes that grew lanky, leaning heavy with clusters of small, deep blue, fairy sized berries, like a cross between blueberries and grapes on the vine, but so much smaller. I loved picking them so much, that I went back for more the next day, while on a spontaneous trip to the coast, to refill yet another bucket. I find the ripening of these fruits to be perfectly timely, in the early Autumn, when the air is beginning to crisp. They emerge in their simple glory, tantalizing us to pick them by their deep, alluring color, ready to work in our bodies as medicine to heal from ailments such as common colds and flus.
I am working on pulling the last of the berries off of their thin, wisps of stems, and freezing them into large zip-lock bags for future use. I intend to infuse them raw into a raw, local honey syrup to use medicinally as well as a tasty treat. I will also bake some into a deep-dish pie for our dessert pleasure. Hopefully I will create some elderberry kombucha tea, and maybe even some elder mead or jam, if I find the time. This is one of the things that I love about the Pacific Northwest. Wild food.
Just before we left, as I was nursing my boy in the tall grass, we spotted vultures. The more adventurous of the group went off to find what they were feeding on. It turned out to be a buck who was no longer among the living. Not fresh enough to be used for meat, and not aged enough to be used for bone or antlers, we left him to the birds. The smell had us heading for home when the wind changed. I wouldn't have eaten him anyway. I'm not much of a mammal eatin' girl.