Blackberry Summer
by Mary Lou Healy
It's blackberry time again. This is a time like no other. High summer. The
early morning air is cool and sweet-scented yet with a hint of heat to come.
It's the time of year one remembers from childhood, the long, long days
of carefree wandering and dreaming.
In blackberry time, for us country dwellers, it's possible to bring those
days alive again, at least for a brief spell. We start out early, before
the sun reaches its zenith. But not too early!
Too early means mosquitoes still lurking in small hungry clouds in the moist
coolness under the berry vines. Too early means a heavy dew, bowing down
the grasses, soaking shoes and pant legs.
Veteran blackberriers dress in protective armor - tough jeans and sturdy
footwear and long sleeves, even on the hottest days - to fend off grasping
thorns. Add a brimmed, air-cooled hat, some containers, and we're ready
to go. In our family, containers were usually large oatmeal boxes hung from
a belt around our middles, leaving both hands free to pick.
Off we'd go through the crystal morning, across our apple orchard, down
the lane where arching branches created a natural cathedral aisle and across
a second field clad in Queen Anne's Lace. Along its walls, in wild profusion,
grow blackberry vines held in the full glow of the sun but backdropped by
the green darkness of aromatic pines in the woodlot beyond.
Here blackberries, thimbleberries and raspberries are interwoven like a
Chinese puzzle. "That long arched prickly streamer which bent over,
down from the hedge's top, its garland rough, bearing the beloved Blackberries,"
wrote Louisa Twamley in 1836. Some things never change.
Harvesting begins amid the inquisitiveness of chipmunks, the deep thrumming
of bees intent upon their own affairs and feeling the press of autumn just
around the corner, and the indignation of birds who regard this wild bounty
as their own.
Lifting the whippety branches and ever wary of thorns, we gather fruit,
a handful for the box, a couple of extra-ripely delicious ones for the mouth.
Purple stains of berry time linger long on our fingers after all the fruit
has been consumed or stored away.
Scratched hands and the occasional stinging blow from a backlashing branch
are a fair price to pay for the quarts of fat, glistening blackberries that
hang where, it seems, only a few short weeks ago drifts of white blossoms
lay along the mossy stone walls like a delicate fall of snow. How swiftly
the days have passed, while petals blew away and tiny fruit swelled green
to red, then purple-black and bursting with juice.
Everything has its hazards. The occasional snake slithers underfoot as anxious
to depart as are we to bid them good-bye. Sometimes a wasp nest hangs from
a laden branch. Wise pickers move to safer territory. I still smile remembering
a Rowland Wilson cartoon ad for an insurance company, showing a couple picking
blackberries. The woman, grasping a particularly large "berry",
the nose of an awakening bear, replies to her companion's question: "My
insurance company? New England Life, of course. Why?"
The main drawback to gathering blackberries is the thorns. To eating them,
it's the seeds. Forget the seeds and concentrate on the flavor. Mashed,
sweetened and ladled over hot homemade biscuits, crowned with clouds of
whipped cream; baked in pies and served warm, vanilla ice cream just beginning
to melt in rich little runnels over the pastry crust...ah, flavor!
In blackberry season, jam jars await filling from bubbling cauldrons wreathed
in sweet vapors that fill the summer kitchen. Grandmother always had two
kitchens. One was headquarters for cooking and canning; the other, a cool
refuge for "lemonade lunches." Twin kitchens are a vanishing luxury,
found only in old-time farmhouses, I suppose. Some good things are lost
to the modern lifestyle.
Now I live in a house next door to Grandmother's house. Her black iron range
is cold now and I cook in my "new-fangled" kitchen. But I still
have her old skimmer with which she lifted the foam from her boiling jelly.
My batches of jam are far more modest than those my mother and grandmother
made. I remember with real nostalgia the shelf upon shelf of glowing jellies
stored by them against the cold white winter days.
Instead of the steamy summer kitchen, filled with canning jars and busy
women in aprons, I choose the cooler route, bagging my extra berries and
popping them in the freezer. If I choose, in January, I may stir up a batch
of jam, enjoying the warmth I might have turned away from in August.
In the steam rising from the pot, the sweet, tempting essence of sun-warmed
blackberries will come to me. Then I'll close my eyes and stand in a meadow
of Queen Anne's Lace, pines lifting darkly beyond. A towhee calls; a chipmunk
scolds.
Some things you can keep forever.