At my grandmother’s house, it was a mansion really, where I spent most of my holidays we had these enormous mulberry trees, 2 of them at the front yard. And two normal sized ones in the back garden. Enormous meaning taller then our 2.5 story house. At night their shadows reflect to my bedroom’s ceiling and branches tapping to my window. Kinda spooky.
When the mulberries were ripe enough, they started falling on the ground, on us, on the car, on who ever passed by. It was the sign for “dut silkme” -shaking off the mulberry-. since we had that fruitful trees, that social gathering occurred couple of times every summer with the participation of all the neighbors and their children, my friends.
My granny had a big, thick, white cotton linen, big enough to cover all the branches’ dimension let’s say. So she calls the neighbors, and we hold this linen from its rims, antd stretch it as much as we could, 10-15 people, holding it strong, trying not letting it slip from our hands and ruining the mulberries. That was a hard task, but every one of us took the deal, cause the award will be trays full of mulberries!
So the carnival begins! My grandmother’s brother, my beloved Sırrı, climbs up the tree like a monkey with a long stick in his hand and starts hitting the branches gently, tapping them which are full of ripe mulberries, avoiding to break them and falling of the tree at the same time. Then the mulberry shower starts, so does our laughter! The fruits falling on our heads, on the linen, and everywhere else. Some of us ducking under the linen yelping at the same time, my granny shouting out “Sırrı, you gonna fall be careful… ” What a show!
When the shower stops, granny brings enamel trays and fills them up, sparing us a trayful as well and send us off to the garden to play! We finish all the tray, have stomach cramps rest of the day… But that never stopped me from eating that other tray on the kitchen table…
So many beautiful memories around the mulberry…
