Strange Fruit

I ate a strange fruit from this Kousa dogwood tree and lived to tell the tale!

Last Sunday I finally did something interesting. Okay, yes, my life is boring, I admit it. Same old same old: Where should we eat. Do the laundry. See a movie. Feed the cats. Work on my book. Promise to start a new painting but don't. Then suddenly there was new stuff going on right in front of me I knew nothing about, and it was downright fun, even more fun than getting stoned and watching The Hangover again. And part of the joy of learning something new was the fact that the teacher was a pretty cool guy.

A walking tour of the Munjoy Hill neighborhood of Portland, specifically to find what are termed "wild edibles," was conducted by my son Zack, who has begun sharing his considerable knowledge about the natural world gleaned from several years of study at a local living school nestled deep in the Maine woods. Wild edibles are plants that grow naturally in this climate and bear fruit, leaves or roots that are edible. Just like apples and peaches and pears and all the rest of the common things we buy in stores, there are lesser-known fruits all around us that can be eaten or cooked to be used in jams, jellies and candies. In many cases they are even free for the picking.

Included on Zack's tour, which encompassed perhaps a square mile, were crab apples, acorns, milkweed and numerous kinds of berries hanging in heavy clumps off vines and bushes. One dark purple mini-grape tasted more like grapes than store-bought grapes ever taste, in fact they tasted exactly like grape Lifesavers. And a certain kind of dogwood tree was laden with a weird-looking fruit that resembles a miniature medieval weapon (See photo). Scary at first, it turned out to have a sweet, tangy, mango-like flavor once I got the courage to squeeze it open.

I'm smarter now, but I might need a refresher course because I'm pretty sure I forget which ones look perfectly fine but are actually poisonous. (There were several of those look-alikes, so don't try this on your own without a very knowledgeable guide.)