Indianz.Com > News > Yellow Bird: Good friends and good chokecherries

Yellow Bird: Good friends and good chokecherries
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Filed Under: Opinion

"Monday night — I missed the TV show “The Closer” to do this — my sister, Liz; daughter, Karen; and friend and scientist, Jennifer, went north and east to Thief River Falls and then beyond to a farm near Middle River, Minn., to see Susan Halverson. Friend Jennifer works for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and is researching some of our wild fruits to find their nutritional values.

Ripe chokecherries are a little hard to find this year; they’re spotty at best. But northern Minnesota is one of the places where everything seems to grow in great profusion. And this year with the moisture, the area is lush and ripe.

Susan has a farm near Middle River that spreads into a forestlike area. It wasn’t far from the Red Lake forest, where several friends and I once went deep in the woods to howl with the wolves. I told that story to the gang in the car the other day. Someone said the number of wolves has increased dramatically, and if we went howling again, a wolf pack might mistake us for a meal.

Yikes, I thought. Cross that off my list of things to do.

With my daughter’s four-wheel-drive SUV, we could drive around and through the winding paths of the Halversons’ forested farm. We got some chokecherries and raspberries, and I saw many plants that I’d never seen in the western Plains."

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Dorreen Yellow Bird: Great friends, good chokecherries (The Grand Forks Herald 8/20)
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