Miss Kershaw's raspberries -- "a taste I can conjure in the dead of winter"

 

I have an exuberant stand of golden raspberries in the alley behind my house, all mixed up with burgundy clematis. People strolling down the alley often stop for a snack and I have given starts to several neighbors. The berries are fragile, not suitable for packing and shipping, so you won't see them in stores. And they have a story:

When they were in their 70s, Thurston Griggs and Murray, who had been junior high and high school classmates in Tacoma, started corresponding.

Murray to Thurston Griggs

July 28 '91

Dear Thurston...

Do you remember Jessie Kershaw, Miss Kershaw, who taught dancing in the studio above Roberts Brothers store at Division and I? Tennis champion of Tacoma around 1901? President of the Tacoma Humane Society, who used to picket rodeos? Had a house full of cats and cat crap and a pair of old hunting dogs, Guy and Scamp, who fought as a team, one grabbing the other dog's right front paw, the other going for the throat? Probably not; certainly not all that. Those are my memories of her because she lived two doors north of us on Eye street in a big gray house with horse chestnuts on the parking strip, a hitching posts, too, still in place, and a Secret Garden of a yard with the first, and biggest Japanese cutleaf maple of my memory and two shiny barked cherry trees, one Bing, the other Royal Anne, which we could pick and give her half, or raid when we knew she was out walking the dogs. Along the alley behind the house she had a row of raspberry bushes, very bushy, so that by crouching we could pick them without being seen from her kitchen window. Most of them were yellow raspberries, which have a distinctive taste, a taste I can conjure in the dead of winter. A taste I used to think about when walking the snowdrifts in Massacre Alley on Attu. I told Mrs. Kershaw about that when I came home after the war and when she heard that Rosa and I had bought our place at Trout Lake she came over to Dad's house with a dozen rooted plants and gave them to me, saying "I just want you to have the pleasure of watching little boys steal them."

I'm just in from our backyard where the raspberries are growing behind the vegetable patch and in front of the acre or so of second growth doug fir, alder and cottonwood that has grown up since this place was logged about 1910. The bushes haven't been cared for, except for putting grass clippings on the bed in the fall, and they don't get a proper amount of sun, what with the trees and the fact that we are on the north slope of North Hill which is the equivalent of Al Capp's Lower Slobovia, but they are still bearing after all this time and are one of the few things that taste as good as I remember things tasting 70 years ago. 

best,

Murray

Miss Kershaw's given name was actually Dorothy. (In her private life she was Mrs. Mylne Keena.) Her mother had been a drama and dance instructor at Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma, which helps explain both her own career as a dance instructor and her place in the traditionalist wing of Tacoma society. Well-brought-up young Tacomans of the 1920s put on their patent leather shoes, climbed the stairs to her studio upstairs in the Roberts Brothers building, and learned to waltz.

Although his mom (whose stepfather had been Chief Justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court) might have liked the idea, Murray was not one of Miss Kershaw's students. Thurston was, however, and he hated it:

"Miss Kershaw was a nemesis to me because I was consigned to her dancing class, and those were the most readily expendable days of my childhood. How I resented that! For one thing, my older brother had rebelled completely; he said it was 'sissy stuff' and no red-blooded western man needed that frilly affectation. But our folks were intent on bringing us up as gentlemen and ladies in the Eastern tradition. We had to wear white gloves; patent leather special-purpose shoes (that hurt); special clothes; special combing of the hair; preliminary bathing. We lined up on opposite sides of that prison on top of Roberts Brothers, boys on one side and girls on the other, and, after a demonstration of how to do it, we were to choose partners. Oh, it was painful! I used to wait as long as possible before choosing, because I didn't want any partner anyway. Besides, I didn't want to convey the impression that I might have a favorite. Beth Pascoe seemed to have the same attitude as me, so often I would find her last to be chosen and I would pick her, so that we could suffer together. I'll swear that she used to groan and mutter, and I used to interpret that not so much as a response to me personally as to the entire process. We had to hold our hands just so; stand just so far apart. Then of course we had to watch the couples who performed best, presumably in adulation of their skill. Miss Kershaw was so "pat" with it all, that it seemed to me she was doing it in her sleep. Eventually I feigned illness so frequently that my mother gave up...