Raspberry bushes are amazing things. You can plant 2-3 spindly little bushes and end up with a whole crop of beautiful berries in relatively few years. In my kids youth, I'd send them and any neighbor kids around off with a Cool Whip or margarine tub to pick what they can. We never spray them, so the kids would happily pop them in their mouths as they picked. Occasionally they got a taste of the little black bugs that seem to love to inhabit the berries.
In much the same way I let many of sources of enjoyment slide in the two years I had stretched my mental and physical capacity to their ends, I've sort of let the raspberry bushes go. But darn if the buggers, having not been cleaned up at the end of summer the last two years, still found a way to grow strong and hardy through the brandly trees that started taking root amongst them. I picked my first 1/2 cup last night. 
To get all philosophical, those bushes in an odd sort of way, make me think about the person who no matter how little external care and feeding they receive, seem to find the way to persevere. I have twinges of a raspberry kind of life. I Like to think I am a fighter. I have had my share of spindly trees, blocking my growth, and yet I worked to nudge myself around them. I'll need to get up early before the heat kicks in for the next two weeks and get the berries picked. By Sunday morning, I should start to get a quart every couple days. We will eat some fresh, and I will make jam. We'll enjoy the sweet taste of summer in the cold of winter. But this fall, I'm going to get the weedy clutter pulled and give my friends a nice organized path to grow even stronger next spring.
