The blackberry hunters
Source: Press-Register - al.com (Original Article)
Once in an Alabama time it is hard now to remember, bankers
and grocers, preachers and farmers, housewives and school
children all abandoned their stores and their fields and
their gardens and their homes and became a community of
hunters and gatherers.
It happened on those first days of American summer, when the
mid-day sun was near about searing but the nights were still
cool, and the wild grass was just high enough to tickle the
back of your knee.
Black and white, remnants of Choctaw and Creek, Juzans and
Smiths. McPhersons and Schumperts, the extended families of
Petronis and Perlinsky, they all put on their roughest
clothes and grabbed a pail and a long stick to scare the
snakes away, and plundered the thickets of fieldrows and
roadsides, harvesting what no one had planted, and no one
had bothered to tend: Blackberries, by the bucketload.
In those days, the woods were full of delights free for the
picking, mayhaws and wild strawberries, persimmons and
blueberries (well, huckleberries, if you like), wild crab
apples and elderberries, muscadines and (if you knew where
to look) pawpaws and maypops, sweet hickory nuts and
chinquapin, red mulberry and wild raisin.
But nothing so possessed the wandering mind of the South
like the taste of wild blackberries, pimpled and hairy,
juicy and soft, almost too tart to swallow and too sweet to
ever stop, one more just for me and one for the bucket,
dusty pickers parting wave after wave of thorns for the
biggest, blackest one.
Again the time has come. By some coincidence of climate and
neglect, through providential drought and fortunate
rainfall, the fields of Alabama are thick with the promise
of juicy blackberries, everywhere I go.
Weeding the trailing dewberries from my yard last week was a
painfully delicious pleasure, ripping the spines from my
hands before squeezing the fat berries off the vine. The
taller, bushier blackberries come later, but must Frequent Flyer soon
follow here on the coast, …continue reading