The scarlet streak at the roadside is unmistakeable. I can imagine an Impressionist painter wanting to absorb this place — or a dancer, or a musician — imagine them wanting to hold the feeling of standing here as the sun slips free of the stratus clouds and touches hundreds of winterberries.
Windy Hill Orchard grows rows of bushes every year. You can walk into a sea of scarlet higher than your head, and they’re bright even on cold, cloudy afternoons. I can look through them to Monument Mountain on the horizon.
The pathways there hold memories of the people whose homelands I’m standing on. When a place in the mountains soothes me with beauty, I think of the people of the Mohican nation, and I feel thankful and sad, knowing how deeply they love these hills. They would have seen winterberry in the marshes across so many years, and they still do.
This week I’m feeling thankful for the land. I’m thankful for the smudge of wetland where I live, and the bluebirds and thrushes and robins, mockingbirds and cedar waxwings who eat the winterberries, and all the people around me who keep open space open, or grow food with understanding, or care for the river and teach the names of plants, or walk in the winter fields and look for seed pods opening …
A blaze of berries
Winterberry glows in the sun at Windy Hill Orchard in Great Barrington.
Winterberry brightens the fields at Windy Hill Orchard in Great Barrington. They cut the branches for holiday wreathes, or you can take home an armload to set in a mason jar full of water on the kitchen table — and a peck of eight kinds of apples too.
Events coming up …
Find more art and performance, outdoors and food in the BTW events calendar.
