My favorite weeks of the year are here.  Raspberry season.  Season of the largest, ripest, falling-apart-est, delicately delicious raspberries on earth.  Raspberries picked fresh this morning by you or a farmer, and eaten ideally before they ever get a chance to examine the inside of a refrigerator.  Raspberries eaten off the tips of one’s fingers which, if you haven’t tried it, is the best way to eat raspberries.

Raspberry eating is not, of course, a universal experience.  This is the country, after all, where “raspberry flavored” items are often blue.  I still can’t figure out how you get blue out of a raspberry.  And most of the actual raspberry consumption in this country seems to be of raspberries that are lacking in, well, raspberriness.  This is especially criminal in the Pacific Northwest where July raspberries grow bigger than lattés (well, maybe short lattés) and drip with the flavor of summer.

If the only raspberry you’ve ever eaten is a tiny, hard, flavorless, seed-heavy one out of a Driscoll’s box, a raspberry that couldn’t stain your fingers if it tried, but is too tired to try after flying here from the other side of the world, then you haven’t ever had a proper raspberry.  The best raspberries fall apart on your tongue, if not on their way to your tongue.  The best raspberries reward you brazenly with sweetness.  The best raspberries tempt even monofruitistic devotees of, say, the blueberry, who feel deliciously guilty from the sudden attraction to another berry.  The best raspberries blush wildly, but have no shame.

Enough.  Get thee to a raspberryery.  (Or, if they don’t have one near where you live, a farmers’ market or u-pick place will suffice.)  Get enough to quench your raspberry lust, plus some to share.  Buy the best-looking berries, the ones with the largest bumps, that can barely hold their shape, and are already starting to sweat raspberry juice.  Eat the ones that are falling apart first; they’re the best and won’t survive anyway.  And, if you get really into it, try putting one on each finger and exuberantly eating them off (berries, not fingers).  It’s fun, it’s delicious, and you definitely can’t do it with blueberries.