Why blackberries will always mean summer, peace, and lots and lots of hard work to me.

So few of us ever really think about where the food we eat comes from. We just hop in our shiny cars, run down to the grocery store, load up our carts, and pay with our credit cards, or an ever more common trend, pay someone else to shop for us and either pickup or have the shopping delivered right to our doors. We are living in a a modern era of extreme convenience. But everyone should, every once in a while, stop and really think about where that food came from, whether it's the organic, whole grain bread you buy from Whole Foods, or the hyper processed cheap burger from the unnamed big McChain restaurant. Food is important and many people are living on a knife's edge, going without, when they shouldn't be. So much food goes to waste every day that could be used to feed those people. But that's not what I really want to talk about.

Think back to when you were a kid. Summer time probably meant playing outside, popsicles and ice cream, bike rides, maybe swimming, friends, and free time, right? Not all of us had the same experiences, and not all of them were bad . Far from it. I grew up in a house with two younger brothers, my mother, my disabled father, my grandmother, and myself, all squeezed into a rather small space (it started as a three very [small] bedroom house with a pantry and back porch until we expanded it and added another bedroom, a dining room and changed the porch to a utility room so we could add a freezer, laundry setup, and pantry type setup). We were on a tight budget, so we had a garden for a long time and gardens take work, especially where we lived. You have to till the soil, pull all the rocks - and trust me, where we were it seemed like you grew rocks more than crops some years, hoe the rows neatly into lines for the seeds, plant everything, weed constantly, water every few days, try to keep the deer, rabbits , groundhogs, and other various wildlife from eating your plants, and still try to encourage the plants as much as you can, maybe even fertilizing them with some compost or pre-bought fertilizer. If you were lucky and worked hard, you could get some really tasty produce from a garden, but it was a lot of hard work. My mother, the primary driving force behind our garden, also took the extra step of home canning things when we had a particularly good harvest, like the year we had bushels and bushels of green beans and tomatoes. She made so many canned green beans it lasted us for years, same with the tomato sauce and home jarred tomatoes. It was all delicious and helped stretch the budget a lot, as well as teaching me the value of hard work and what it takes to actually grow food and feed people. As I got older, my role changed from just garden helper and garden waterer to stone carrier, weed puller, compost bucket emptier, and then when I was just entering my preteens, my Dad took me berry picking for the first time, telling me this would be my job from then on, teaching me as we went how to tend the plants, something he had been doing but wasn't really able to do much anymore. It soon became one of my favorite summer chores. We had just over a one acre property and the whole thing was ringed with wild black raspberries, wild blackberries, and wild raspberry bushes, all growing together, and growing in clusters in the middle of grass in a few places as well, from where the birds had taken berries and dropped them. We also had what we, as kids called bird bushes, bushes full of berries that humans can't eat, but attracted birds and were harmless food for them. The black raspberries and blackberries liked to occasionally grow in with those bushes as well, intertwining amongst the branches of the more well established and larger bushes for support.

I learned from my Dad, over the course of one or two summers, before his disability got too bad, how to handle the bushes carefully. How to tell if a berry was ripe, - the trick is to GENTLY pull on the berry, it should come off easily, without bruising the fruit, if it's actually ripe, barely any force needed - how and when to replant the vines as they grew, when and how to cut them back so they grew in stronger, more productive and healthier, and how to remove the Japanese Beetles that plagued the bushes, eating the leaves, stems and plants, killing whole crops and blighting the entire Northeast coast. (Best way to kill them, by the way is to take a small soda bottle, like a twenty oz. size, and fill it about one third of the way with kerosene, then drop the beetles in. Don't close the lid or light it, they drown just fine. Gasoline also works, or a mix of the two.) As my Dad watched me over the summer, he gave me tips, but mostly it was just Dad and daughter time, something rather rare. We would talk, or listen to music, blasting loud, especially after he started to need to bring the riding lawn mower to ride around to come with me. We would tie a bucket to our waists - usually for the first week or so we would use a small one, only a pint size or so, then the next few weeks were a quart, then quickly needing a gallon size, often coming back with close to half a gallon or even a few times three quarters of a gallon of mixed berries. I didn't tend to eat the berries as we were picking them, saving them in hopes Mom would have enough to make a pie, a cobbler (for those who don't know, it's like a fruit and biscuit or pie crust dish without a bottom), or some jam. Sometimes she did, or we would all just have enough for a nice dessert, or even a treat on our cereal in the morning (Mom didn't really buy a lot of sweet cereal, so we had a lot of Rice Crispies, Cheerios, and cereals like that), adding a sweet start to the day. I felt like I was actually helping, doing a job that no one else could do, as my Dad wasn't able to do it anymore and my brothers were too young. I tried to teach them, when they grew older, but they had little interest.

To me, one of my favorite summer memories was just standing in the tall blackberry bushes, the smell of the ripening fruit all around me, a small safe space cut out in the middle of a lush jungle like environment, trees, vines, and bushes all around me, the quiet only broken by me, when I would occasionally sing or listen to music or an audiobook as I worked. If it took me three or four hours, which it often did, my only real concern was making sure I didn't get stung by a bee, sunburned, or cut too badly by the berry vines and thorns (those canes can whip around and leave NASTY cats and scars and the thorns are no joke). My mother and father knew I was working hard, helping, and I would come back with ample evidence by summers end, usually having to go picking every other day, or some years every day, and getting nearly a half gallon every time. July and August were filled with the smells of warm fruit, hot sun, and green growing plants to me, forever. If life got too hard during those months, I could go put on my jeans, a long sleeved shirt (or if it was really hot and I was brave, leave a short sleeved shirt on), and sneakers, then head out and go to the berry bushes, almost any time of day - maybe not at the very hottest part of the day or after dark, just because it was hard both on the plants and on me. Berry picking saved me from many arguments and problems over the years, as things with my father devolved. But things with him are a complete different story, a long and twisted one I don't intend to tell today. To be honest, reflecting on blackberries, summer, and where food comes from brings back a lot of peaceful memories from a turbulent time in my life. Maybe that's why blackberries have always been one of my favorite fruits. Why I seek them out, even when it's the dead of winter and I know they are out of season. I'm trying to recapture that quiet taste of peaceful summer that I had back when I was picking blackberries, black raspberries, and wild raspberries as a teenager, alone with just my thoughts.