Return of Memoryfest - Day 30/31

[bironic]

OMG, the comment backlog. I’m all caught up on Untouchable; now to tackle your stories for Memoryfest. Guess I’ve got my work cut out for me tomorrow.

30. Elementary School

Comments

[thewlisian_afer]

"[Japanese Honeysuckle] has done severe damage to eastern American woodlands, often forming vast colonies on forest floors that displace virtually all native ground plants, and climbing into trees and shrubs and severely weakening and even killing them by cutting off sap flow and shading their leaves," says Wikipedia. I think I was about 11 or 12 when I was puttering around in the woods behind my house one day and I discovered something like this. About a half a mile back from the road and maybe a mile and a half to the south, there's a rock quarry that I liked to play in. Apparently some rocks had been taken out since the last time I was there because I found myself in a part of it that I hadn't been able to get to before. There was a small cliff, maybe 25 feet high or so, and there were honeysuckle vines growing over the top edge and all the way down to the ground, totally covering the cliff side. I sat at the bottom of the cliff all afternoon, pulling the honeysuckle off the vines and eating the bits that Daddy had taught me

[roga]

Mmm, honeysuckle... Whenever I got locked out of the house when I was a kid, I used to sit by our honeysuckle bush and drink the nectar until someone with a key came come. There were one or two other plants I knew how to drink the nectar from, but this was my favorite.

I miss knowing nature like that. I used to pick chubezas from wayward bushes and eat them like candy; pick the grains from a stem of wheat to much on trips, chew the clean, white rooty part of grass stems when I was bored, make necklaces from pine needles.

It's all laptops and DVDs and smog now. Where has all the nature gone?

[thewlisian_afer]

I used to eat grass roots, too. :D And we had blackberry bushes near the shed in the yard. I'd sit against the shed, as far into the bushes as the thorns would let me be, and pick all the berries within reach. There was a mulberry tree, too, that I'd climb into and eat mulberries until my fingers were stained with the juice. I also used to love to sneak into my father's garden and steal his snap peas. XD Man, food is the best when it goes directly to your mouth from the source. ♥

[elynittria]

At my father's friend's place in the Poconos, there were lots of huckleberry bushes (sort of a wild version of blueberries) on the edges of the swamp. We'd often go to pick the berries for my Mom to make pies with later (yum). Of course, as many went into our mouths as into our pails. (Of course, while picking one had to keep an eye out for the black bears, which also loved the berries!)