I live for blackberry season

On quarts, cobblers, and anticipation

This morning the heat wave broke, and we went out to pick blackberries. It was my second picking venture of the season: June and I went one day last week, but there were fewer ripe berries, only two or three cups’ worth. I’ve been watching a particular thicket, the one at the far end of the walking route our household calls the Loop. The road curves there, along the thicket, and behind the thicket the gently sloping ground becomes a semi-cliff plunging toward the Sound, the kind of topography that looks primed for a natural disaster, that makes people itch to build wildly expensive homes. There at the top of the semi-cliff, at that curve, the blackberries get unobstructed sunlight. They began to ripen a week ago, and after that, I began to check them every day. All the other neighborhood blackberries are still green, at best rosy around the shoulders. But these bushes are already full-on, rolling deep. This morning Ash and I pulled on our sweatshirts¹, raided the Tupperware cabinet for suitable vessels, and set out.

I toted along my Fuji Instax!

I don’t know how it happened or when I got into blackberry picking. They’re not my favorite fruit or even my favorite berry. Raw, my feeling for them is barely more than indifference, except maybe in smoothies. I like them in smoothies. I very much like them baked into things — cobblers and pies come to mind. But what I really like is the picking, and the lead-up to the picking.

I love anticipation. Here is something I’ve figured out as an adult: I like to know what’s coming, so I can look forward to it. I think this is a very reasonable way to be, though it also means that I don’t like surprises, a facet of my personality that makes my spouse love me a little less than they otherwise might. But anticipation! I fucking live for it. I live for blackberry season, keeping watch each spring as the bushes creep out and over everything like the nasty invasives they are; listening for the droning buzz of bees in the blackberry flowers each early summer, like the whole thicket is purring, like an engine warming up; noticing as the first pink berries become the first black ones and then the first black ones become fully ripe fatties, their drupelets plumped with juice. Blackberry season is 70% waiting, 15% extricating thorns from one’s skin, hair, and clothing, and 15% orgy of cobbler-eating².

I was ten, I think, the first time I picked blackberries. My aunt Millicent in Issaquah³ was sick with cancer, and my mother and I had flown in from Oklahoma to visit and help care for her. Or maybe she wasn’t sick yet; maybe we were in in town for her wedding, which would have been three summers prior. I would have been seven then, a month shy of eight. We picked blackberries at the edge of the woods behind the house where she and her new husband Tom Youngs lived. When we brought the berries inside, our family’s other Tom was there — Tom Jones, the longtime partner of my uncle Jerry; they must have been in town for the wedding — baked them into a fabulous blackberry pie. It’s possible I’ve conflated Toms and deaths.

I don’t think I picked blackberries again for more than a decade. There wasn’t an opportunity. I don’t remember blackberries growing in northern California, where I spent four years of college, or in Oklahoma. But when I moved to Seattle for graduate school, they were everywhere: growing over fences and reaching into sidewalks, along the edges of public parks, on the on-ramps and off-ramps of highways. A new friend invited me to her parents’ house to pick in their backyard. Hers was a family of experienced blackberry foragers, and they taught me a few things. Did you know that you can make a cheap and excellent hands-free receptacle for blackberries from an old quart-sized plastic yogurt container with two holes poked near the rim and a length of twine knotted through them to serve as a neck strap? Now you do.

I hated the thorns at first, but like rain and swimming in cold water, when you live in the Pacific Northwest, you get used to them. I started to pick on my own. I remember picking blackberries behind the duplex we rented on 8th Avenue. I felt like I’d struck gold, having a blackberry thicket in my own yard — but so, apparently, did the woman who lived in the house next door, who came marching out to tell me that the bushes were hers, that she’d planted them, and that she used their berries to make cordial. As though anyone in Seattle has ever planted a blackberry bush! Har. You don’t decide to grow blackberries here; you decide how hard you’re willing to fight to keep them from growing over everything.

It seems, then, like a small service, almost, to pick the blackberries that I find growing in public spaces, to try to get to them before berry-eating animals do, before their seeds are carried away in beaks and bodies to take root somewhere else. I don’t know if it helps, really. I probably delude myself. But I have always felt a little valiant when I pick blackberries at Discovery Park, say, near the steps to the beach at the north end, or along the public stairs built into so many hilly neighborhoods of this city. When Ash and I were dating, they rented a room in a house in northwest Capitol Hill, where the city slopes toward downtown. There was a pub we liked to walk to in South Lake Union, and on the way down the hill, I’d pick blackberries. I remember filling an entire pint glass from one single bush, but I don’t remember where the pint glass came from. Surely we didn’t steal it from the pub? We must have brought it from Ash’s apartment, though when they moved into my house, they didn’t bring any pint glasses.

The spring before that summer, I’d gotten my second tattoo. It says blackberry, blackberry, blackberry, the words running up the inside of my right forearm. Despite everything I’ve written here, I did not get the word blackberry tattooed three times on my arm because I like to pick blackberries; the tattoo refers to a poem I love⁴, not the fruit itself. (I am full of surprises!) Ash took a picture of me that summer — my arm with its fresh tattoo, my hand holding the glass of berries. It was too on-the-nose; I deleted it.

Those first few times, Ash didn’t pick with me. They don’t like most types of fruit. But later that same summer, we drove with my mother and June up the coast to Sechelt, British Columbia, and somewhere there, near a weird petting zoo we found on Yelp, there was an outstanding blackberry thicket. We didn’t have a Tupperware or anything like it in the car, but we did somehow have an empty egg carton. Ash joined me and June in the picking, and they were surprised to find that they loved it. We filled the carton, top and bottom, until it was stained purple and sagging.

If you pick a lot of blackberries, you will notice how, as the berries turn from ripe to overripe, the sheen on the surface of the drupelets dulls. It’s like the difference between high-gloss and matte paint. You want the fruit to detach readily from the stem, but not to smear between your fingers. If you pick a lot of blackberries, you will also have been told that they are full of worms — the larvae of fruit flies, as I understand it. It’s harmless. I have eaten a lot of fruit-fly larvae. What you do have to watch out for, though, is chemical sprays. Once, when I was picking blackberries on the street corner opposite our house, a neighbor yelled down from his stoop to be careful, that he’d eaten from that bush the day before and had spent much of the remaining afternoon in the bathroom. In retrospect, he said, he remembered seeing someone spraying that thicket a few days earlier. Humans, man. They’ll get you every time.

It was a shame, because those bushes were once my standbys for a quick afternoon pick. When June still took naps, I could run over and pick a quart and still be within earshot of her bedroom window, in case she woke up. Later, when she stopped napping, she’d come with me. She cared less about the thorns than I’d feared she would, probably because a snag or a prick was a small price to pay for all the blackberries she could eat. We began to venture farther and farther into the neighborhood, a whole circuit of blackberry bushes. She’ll even consent now to a blackberry walk in midday heat, if that’s what circumstances demand.

Last week, as we panted home up the hill, she said, “Mama, remember when I used to eat more blackberries than I’d put in the container? When did I stop doing that?”

I raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware that you had,” I said. She grinned and walked ahead.

1. When picking blackberries, one should never ever wear a puffy coat or vest or anything similarly feather- or down-alternative-stuffed. Your clothing will get snagged on thorns, and the outer fabric of most puffy coats tears more easily than you’d think.

2. This recipe is my favorite cobbler, forever. These days, I make it entirely with blackberries.

3. Issaquah is a town about 45 minutes east of Seattle.

4. The poem is Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas.”