November 15, 2012

This is one of those rare mornings when I truly did not want to get up, when staying in bed warm under the covers seemed like the best idea!  But eventually, the little voices of all those things you have to do just keep getting louder and louder until they are too loud to ignore.  Still, I was in bed a lot later than usual!  All the clouds have vanished and the sky is huge this morning, high and blue and unmarked.  Wind is still wandering through but not with the determined march of yesterday, today it's just tickling everything and making it twitch.  Since we have gotten no rain, things are beginning to look very dry.  The maple leaves, mostly a faded yellowing green look like paper, not smooth and moist, but rather like thin dusty leather.  There is some kind of berry ripening but I have no idea what it is, it looks like a vine with soft stems but the berries are really bright red in little clusters where the leaves meet the stem, and where they are ripe they are black, very black.  The birds don't eat them, neither do the squirrels, and Mikayla says the raccoons eat the grapes that grow wild in that corner but not those berries.  They are all over the back neighbor's fence, making it look like Christmas!

And you have got to love the Internet!  I couldn't stand not knowing what they were! They are honeysuckle berries!  All this time I never realized honeysuckle made berries, though now that I am not so fascinated by the berries I can see the leaves are the same.  They say some honeysuckle berries are edible and some are poisonous, seeing how the birds don't eat these they must be the poisonous kind.  We live in a terrific time, where you only have to have a little patience and you can find out whatever you want to know!  What a blessing to have so much knowledge available, people willing to post pictures and help with questions and put out what they know so others might learn too!   There must be thousands of images of red and black berries on a vine posted in various places!  It tickles me that I could look at something for so long and just not recognize it, that being so curious about the berries I never recognized the leaves.  Human beings are sure interesting creatures, full of foibles and contradictions!

Plump red berries
glowing brightly on the stem
promising sweetness

Deliver poison
hang around turning deep black
their truest color

They are just so pretty it's hard to believe they can't be eaten, kind of like the apple in Snow White, lovely outside but corrupt in the meat of it.  It seems there are a lot of things like that, things that look good at first but turn out to be harmful.  I guess, like the birds, you either have to trust instinct or experience to tell what is lovely inside and out!