Freestyle Friday: Blackberry Girl

The berries reminded me.

Round, plump, and black with a pebbly texture; the juice was sweet and stained our mouths, our fingers and the fronts of our shirts. Mother would pretend to be cross when we came home without the promised berries for the pie we had begged her to make. She would shake her head at our sticky fingers, our scratched arms, and the stained shirts. Then she would smile and tell us to get washed up for supper.

This is the opening scene to by first book, Roses and Daisies. Although the book is fictional, this scene is not. My mother did promise to make blackberry pie if we brought her blackberries, and the blackberries never made it to her.

Call us gluttons.

On Vancouver Island blackberries run wild. You don’t have to go far to find them in August, weighing down the tangled branches of the brambles. They multiply and plant themselves wherever they please. The ones in the backyard, I like. The ones in the front yard like to leap out at every passerby slashing clothes, hands, and throats.

A cousin to the tarter raspberry, the blackberry is a surprise with each berry, a sweet one one moment, sour the next. While the raspberry is the flashy girl at the party in the skin tight red dress showing off her cleavage and her thighs, that everyone notices and invites everywhere, it's the blackberry in it's classic black dress, that has the real personality, quiet, dangerous, and able to make her mark with her pointed nails.

There’s a price to pay for this sweetly tart fruit. The thorns that have to be endured are vicious. Roses have nothing on blackberry thorns. Rose thorns are just a warning. Blackberry thorns are the real deal. Rose thorns wish they were blackberry thorns. But they make the mistake of thinking that if they’re big and deadly looking they’re better. It’s not about size, It’s about quantity.

You need to pick blackberries covered in a bee keepers outfit. Or a dressed as a Storm Trooper.

Unless you’re a child which means you’re capable of enduring all kinds of pain that make grown-ups cry.

I never found blackberries in Alberta, well- except for the grocery store. And believe me, those grocery store berries taste like - okay, they have no taste. None. You might as well eat a picture of blackberries. It's pretty hard to describe a non-taste.

I named my space blackberry cottage after the blackberries that I grew up with and surround me now. I took pictures this morning as I picked some for my breakfast. They are in the last stages. Most have dried up on the vine. My friend Suzanne and I picked the vines a couple of weeks ago and a bag of frozen ones are in my freezer now, to be enjoyed when blackberry season is over.

Note - only the black one is ready. And that's only if it pops off easily. Otherwise you'll end up with a mouth of sour. And do you see what I mean about those daggers they carry?