Mark Bishop
Singing News Article
July 2006
You have to be an ambitious person to
pick blackberries. They don't offer themselves up as easily as,
say, strawberries or blueberries. No... to pick blackberries,
you'll have to wade through some tall grass and some thorny brush.
Then when you are finished, you might ought to check your self for
ticks.
On hot summer days when we were younger, mom would send us boys
out with a coffee can each and promise to make a blackberry
cobbler if we could bring back enough. The key in that sentence
was "bring back enough". It was easy enough to find all the
blackberries we would need. But when you pick one and eat it and
then pick one and drop it in the can, then repeat the process, it
takes a while to fill up that coffee can.
Fence rows were a good place to start. One of us could get on one
side of the fence and one of us on the other and we could walk
that fence row, picking berries all along the way. And goodness,
gracious it was hot. Blackberries only make themselves available
in the middle of the summer and your window of opportunity was a
relatively small one. So when it was time to go get them, it was
time to go get them. I can still hear the summer sounds of far-off
lawnmowers and whatever that bug is that makes that long, grinding
whistle. Sometimes it would sound like you were right over top of
it as you walked along the fence row.
After we cleaned out the fence row, we headed back to the fields
behind the house. The brush and trees were thicker and getting
around wasn't as easy as it was around the fences. From here on
out, you had to earn every berry. But oh what berries these were!
These were the cream of the crop, hidden back here next to the
woods and out of sight from the casual berry picker. Some of these
berries were as big as the end of your thumb and as juicy as all
get out.
These berries wouldn't be earned without a few scratches either.
It wasn't uncommon to look over and see one of my brothers trying
to pull some briars off their shirt tail or britches. Each step
had to be measured and it was best to look ahead, determine the
best path and move slowly through the brambles. Sometimes you had
to step over a briary stem while ducking under another. Nobody
gets through without a few cuts and scratches, but some get
through better than others.
If you grew up a city person and never had the opportunity to eat
hot black-berry cobbler, with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream melting
on the side, well then, I feel sorry for you. I'm sure that you
enjoyed your own amenities and conveniences growing up there in
the hustle and bustle of the city life. But I have some wonderful
memories of hot summer days when my only concerns were how to get
through the thorns to that prize bunch of beautiful blackberries.
The sounds and sights and smells of summer are still with me.
After the job was done and our youthful energies were spent on
some other important pursuit like rounding up enough neighborhood
kids for a baseball game or trading comic books, mom would call
out suppertime before long.
After dad came home from work in the early evening, we had supper
together as a family believe it or not. Then after supper, with
plenty of daylight left, we'd be back outside. I guess I'm glad we
didn't have 400 channels on tv back then. We built clubhouses and
rode bikes, played ball and looked for pop bottles to cash in at
the country store. And we picked blackberries.
As the day drew to a close and all of the neighborhood moms and
dads hollered across the dusk for the kids to come home, we would
run up to our own porch. We were hot and sweaty and mom would
remind us that we had to take a bath "first thing before you touch
anything else". But before that, as we sat on the front porch and
watched the sky go from deep red to purple and finally to a deep,
deep blue... mom would hand us each a bowl with some hot
blackberry cobbler and a scoop of vanilla ice-cream melting on
top. These blackberries weren't from the store. They weren't even
planted in a garden. They were growing wild, on their own, all
around us.
We just had to find the best way to enjoy them.
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