summer, cultivated

Do you remember those long summer afternoons, when there was no more school, no more homework, no friends in town, and...nothing to DO?

After hearing us whine about how boooored we were, how there was noooothing to do, and so on, our mother would often hand us each a plastic pitcher or bucket and send us away to pick blackberries. "Pick me enough to make you a cobbler!" she'd say cheerfully as she pushed us out the door.

We lived in what would someday be a subdivision, but, since we were the first people there, all we could see was woods. There were two gravel roads that ran on either side of our property, and on their sunny, dusty margins grew the blackberries. And so we'd go, clutching our buckets, and brave the thorns, poison ivy, chiggers and Japanese beetles to secure our tasty prize.

With experience born of long years of blackberrying, I could tell by feeling a berry whether it was ripe. If it pulled off the stem just so, if it were just such a hardness. And whether it was too far gone, squishing in my hand, smelling faintly alcoholic. I could always tell when it would be a shame to lose a berry of just this ripeness to the oblivion of the cobbler, and I would take it as the miller's portion.

We wore long sleeves and pants to avoid too many scratches, and waded in to those thorny patches fearlessly. Our fingers and mouths eventually became stained a dark purple, as we'd pick all the berries in this patch and move on to the next one. We knew without searching where the best patches were. I could tell you where they were today.

And so we spent those long boring summer afternoons, up to our chins in brambles, talking and laughing together, children with a common purpose and a simple joy. Soon evening would fall, our pitchers would get full, and we'd sprint for the house to strip off all our clothing and shower the chiggers away. All the laundry went into a hot wash, even the underwear (I found out one summer to my great, and itchy, sorrow).

Years passed away, and I became a horticulture student at college and learned the joy of Cultivated Varieties. I discovered that the tiny wild blackberries we'd prized so much had been carefully bred to produce bigger, more prolific berry bushes, with bigger, more delicious berries. So when I procured a house of my own, one that had some area around it, one of the first things we did was fix up an old fence and plant blackberries.

Now we go out to our side yard every couple of days and haul in bucketloads of huge blackberries. I pick down the row with my children, and we talk quietly and eat as we go. I'm reminded of those long summer days I spent with my siblings out in the blackberry patches near the dusty roads. And I am glad to be able to share this experience, this memory, with my own children.

But I chuckle to myself at the way things have changed. The brambles are carefully tied back and pruned. Each berry is a large mouthful, and some of these bushes don't even have thorns. I think fondly of the mad dash for the shower that we don't have to do every time we pick blackberries, and I am thankful that things have happened this way. But I can't help but look down the row at the children and think, in some self-satisfied part of my person, hah. They've got it pretty soft.