Jim Bradshaw: Summer days and mulberry trees

You may have surmised, one of my favorite things to do is to poke around in old newspapers, looking for little items that reflect the character of a place or of the times, or that just catch my fancy.
One of those last kinds, was an item about the formation of a band in Franklin in 1849, apparently with a bit of wincing at first.
The Planters’ Banner reported, “The Brass Band in this place is making fine progress, and will, in a few weeks, make up for some of the hideous noises produced by their first efforts. A thousand bullocks smelling of blood and roaring, bellowing and bleating, aided by owls, donkies, and all the noisy bipeds and quadrupeds in creation could barely have given a concert equal to those of the first two evenings after the trumpets, trombones, &c, arrived from the city.”
The editors of the Opelousas Courier were intrigued in 1853 by what appears to be an early periscope.
“A new kind of mirror has been introduced. which may be considered a kind of labor-saving machine,” the newspaper reported.
“With one of these looking glasses a person need not look out of the window to see what is going on up or down the street. Two mirrors are set at right angles on the window, and in these every individual passing up or down, on either side, is visible to the person sitting inside the window. It is a neat and convenient little affair.”
But the one that recently caught my memory’s eye, and that I found almost poetic, was just one line in the Abbeville Meridional in the early summer of 1899: “Mulberries are ripe and the trees are full of small boys.”
I don’t think I’ve tasted a mulberry, or even seen a tree full of them, since I was a small boy climbing the tree that grew behind our garage.
It had to be climbed to get to the fruit because it was just a few tantalizing feet too far away for a boy to climb onto the garage roof and jump onto a limb.
Adding to the peril of any such attempt, my mother had a bed of prized flowers at the base of the tree.
You didn’t want to think about your fate if you should miss the tree and land in the flowers.
I climbed the tree mountain-climber style, throwing a rope over one of the lower limbs and holding onto it while I “walked” up the tree trunk.
I may be confusing it with another tree, but I think I did it that way because the mulberry had scales on the trunk that poked out pretty far and made it uncomfortable for a kid in summer shorts to just shinny up to the fruit.
And, of course, getting to the fruit was the object of the exercise. It resembled an oversized blackberry and was just as sweet. Sometimes I’d be sent up the tree on purpose, to gather enough for Mom to make jelly. But most of the time it was just to pick and eat the berries myself.
That’s the memory the little item conjured up when I first read it: Sitting in a shady fork of the tree and stuffing myself with sweet berries.
I still can’t think of many better ways to spend part of a warm summer day.
If I were still as nimble as I was then, I might be tempted to try it.
That’s not going to happen, of course. Even if I could do it, the neighbors would surely come out to gawk at an old man sitting in a tree.
But if I had been a small boy in Abbeville in 1899, there’s an almost-sure chance that I would have been one of the those who caught the writer’s eye and elicited the near poetic comment.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.