Blackberry Heaven

 

by Pa Rock

Reminiscer

When my children were little, we had a home in town that sat next to a few vacant and untended lots.  The lots were covered in brush and weeds and served as the perfect landscape for my oldest son, Nick, to prove his chops as a great explorer.  Scattered across that ragged landscape was also an abundance of wild blackberry plants, and Nick would enjoy picking those berries every spring and summer.  I will never forget his bitter disappointment the day we came home from school and discovered that the owner of the lots had them mowed that day and his beloved blackberries were gone.
 
A few years ago Nick had a parttime job working for a local farmer, an individual who had much of interest in the way of flora and fauna on his small acreage, including a fine planting of blackberries.   Those blackberry plants, unlike the ones of Nick’s youth, were thornless.  One day the farmer sent him home with a dozen or so of the canes, and I suggested that he plant them along the fence row bordering my small garden, which he did.  The other side of the garden was bordered with four o’clocks which I had planted.
 
Today my garden is gone, through laziness on my part, but it has been replaced with blackberry canes which number in the hundreds and cover about half of the garden space, and volunteer four o’clocks which cover the other half.  It is a berry blooming mess!
 
I routinely neglect my four o’clocks, which, even with my neglect remain abundant and beautiful, but Nick takes extra-special of his blackberries, often weeding the plants and watering them during our abundant dry spells.  And he still picks berries – does he ever pick berries!  Our refrigerator is loaded with blackberries packed in plastic containers and food storage baggies.  We will have plenty when the apocalypse finally arrives.
 
One evening a couple of weeks ago I smelled something good cooking in the kitchen and was smart enough to not roam in and snoop or interfere.  Thirty minutes later Nick asked me if I would enjoy a piece of blackberry cobbler.  What a dumb question!  He brought in a bowl of warm blackberry cobbler with a scoop a vanilla ice cream melting on top – and I was in blackberry heaven!  
 
The taste of that wonderful dessert took me back forty-five years to when he would come into the house proudly carrying the little fruits that he had gathered just beyond our front yard – and those memories were every bit as sweet and special as that heavenly cobbler!