Of Blackberries and Summer

Let’s be clear from the start. I love blackberries. I know love is an over-used word. But in this case it expresses well my sentiment. At a restaurant, when others ask for grape jelly for their biscuits, I want blackberry jelly. Don’t even offer me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich unless it’s made with blackberry jelly. Peach cobbler is not even in the running with blackberry cobbler. The only thing more American than baseball are blackberries

My love for blackberries goes back to my childhood when I would pick blackberries at my grandparents. Those blackberries were the wild sort, mind you. Meaning they were difficult to get to, had thorns on them, and were infested with chiggers. A day spent picking blackberries usually ended with a bath with Mama’s homemade Lye soap to kill the chiggers, iodine to heal the scratches, and Calamine lotion to ease the itching. In spite of all that there simply was nothing quite like picking those berries. I still recall with fondness my Mama cooking the berries up into a juice and my Papa squeezing the juice out of the berries through a cheese-cloth. The blackberry jelly I would enjoy the rest of the year has yet to be matched. It made breakfast a truly delicious meal.

The blackberries in my back yard today are the tame sort. No thorns, easy to get to, and chiggers do not find me as easily as they once did. But my yellow lab, Casey, loves to pull the berries off, ripe or not, as we pick them. It is quite the challenge to keep him out of the patch.

We don’t grow enough to make blackberry jelly, but we get enough for Jennifer’s fabulous blackberry pie! There is nothing quite like it either. Add some home made ice cream—blackberry pie a la mode--and summer remains one of those special joys in life.

The berries are just now beginning to ripen and my senses are already anxious for the pie soon to come!! Think I’ll go check the blackberry patch now and taste a berry or two. By the way, did I mention that I love blackberries?!