Last fall I wrote about being halfway down the slippery slope of becoming a bonafide “singer-songwriter.” 

How’s that going, you ask? Well, I’ve already had two paying gigs this month, and I’ve got two more shows this coming week. Including a Fourth of July gig, downtown on the deck at the Vintage, PT’s fancy wine bar.

And, not to brag (yes, I’m bragging), in addition to performing at this fall’s Tumbleweed Acoustic Music Festival with Emily Groff, I’m also a finalist – for the second time in a row – in their songwriters’ competition. Have a look at https://davidpablocohn.com/music for the calendar, along with links to tunes and some YouTube videos of recent performances.

So yeah, I’m not at all sure I’ve reached the bottom of that slippery slope I’d been peering down. But at this point, it’s fair to say that the better part of it is above me by now. I’m pretty much all in, and more than a little bit over my head.

I mean, all of this is in addition to the other craziness I’ve been keeping up with all this time: running the farm, (still!) wrestling with the City over building permits, running that open source software project (Oh, that’s taken an interesting – and I think very positive – turn, I can tell you). And all the stuff about being a supportive husband, and keeping current in both airplanes. And holy cow, it’s summer in the Pacific Northwest, and there are so many freakin’ trails to hike and islands to visit and country roads to bike/drive down!

So yeah, it’s feeling a little overwhelming.

Yesterday was mostly farm work, a day of chasing down thistle that had gotten away from us and trying to finish mowing some of our more challenging terrain before the rains came. Followed by an afternoon of overdue, mind-crushing email.

As afternoon turned the corner to evening (the sun doesn’t go down now until after 9:15), I decided I needed a break. We’ve got an embarrassment of state parks within a stone’s throw, so I decided to clear my head with a walk in the woods around Anderson Lake, about ten minutes south of the farm.

The rain had tapered off entirely – not even a light drizzle – by the time I’d extricated myself from the farm. And since it was around dinner time, my hopes of having the trail to myself were rewarded. What I hadn’t dared to hope was that the first traces of the Most Magical Time of the Year in the Pacific Northwest would have begun.

Berry season.

But there they were – less than 100 meters onto the trail was a veritable wall full of ripe salmonberries. Salmonberries! Right there, where passing strollers should have picked them clean in minutes.

I exercised restraint and limited myself to a handful, and another quarter mile down the way was rewarded with strings of our native blackberries, an alarming number of which were sweet and ripe for the picking.

Then, wait – thimbleberries?!? You’ve got to be kidding me. Fuzzy, faded crimson and fall-apart in your fingers ripe, trailside. To be fair, only a few were ready for sampling, but they, like the others, were Right There on the Trail. I’m used to having to bushwhack deep into the woods for the spots where I remember salmonberries and thimbleberries lurking.

And it kept getting better. Yes, there they were: swathes of everbearing huckleberries, shiny tart and delicious. And then wild cherries – even more tart than the huckles, but ever so tasty.

And what’s that next to them? Weird little blueberry-sized/colored, plum-shaped fruits with leaves I didn’t recognize. I resorted to pulling out my phone and was rewarded with a new berry to add to my catalog: the “osoberry,” also known as Indian plum. Big seed, understated taste, but distinctly sweet and enjoyable.

There were, of course, red elderberries everywhere, but you need to process those before eating them. They taste nasty enough to dissuade you from trying, but if you’re persistent in eating them raw, they apparently contain some compounds that reduce to cyanide during digestion. No thank you.

I won’t say that my berry foraging left me with a full stomach. I stayed well on the side of “leave more than you take.” But by the time I ambled back to the car, having bathed in the mist-shrouded late-afternoon green, my heart could not have been more full. I bet there’s a song there somewhere…

Deer in the front pasture having their own little feast.