Every year, I would pick a few richly flavored berries, and then the stems would get covered with white and the berries would shrivel up and turn into tantalizing little rocks. But the red raspberries were fine. Finally, I acknowledged that the black raspberries were going to succumb anyway and I cut them down.
Some of them came back.
Raspberries are like that. So long as they seem healthy they can stay, but now I wonder if the disease in them hasn’t spread to my plum tree. It’s looking so sad. The leaves shriveled up and all the fruits wrinkled up. I fear I’m going to have to replace it.
But to end on a good note, the red raspberries are fine, the sun is shining between the innumerable thunderstorms, and the Butterfly bush — shaggy monster that it is — is offering up its grand purple prose of posies to the bees.
Writing Every Day 