Berry Good

For the past few days here in the Pacific northwest it has been in the high 90's to low 100's with about 300% humidity (no that's not a typo, it just felt that way). Kind of that nasty sticky hot where you dread having to do much in the way of outdoor activity. Today though has marked quite a swing. It only managed to get up to sixty-eight degrees with what do you think? That's right, rain...like we've never seen that stuff around here before. Oh well, I guess I wouldn't be a true American if I didn't complain about the weather.

One good thing did come from our recent "heat wave". The blackberries behind my house have started to ripen. This is one of the treats of summer I really enjoy; going twenty feet outside my door and having an endless supply of berries to munch...yummmmm!!

I've loved eating blackberries in a cobbler, over ice cream or "au naturalle" ever since I can remember. In fact, some of my very fond memories are from when my grandmother (Psycho Mom's mother) and I would break out the metal canoe and traverse the irrigation canals through the rice fields at the duck hunting club where she and grandpa lived. We'd pile into the canoe and tool up and down the waterways scooping up handfuls of the luscious fruit as we went. The stalks would arch high above the earthen banks until the weight of the berries would cause the tips of them to pull back towards the water making it quite literally, "easy pickings".

It's funny, I'm sure it was ridiculously hot while we were out there, but I honestly don't recall that part of it. I just remember feeling like we were great adventurers out on a quest to retrieve the golden prize, and in a way perhaps we really were, because the prize that we found, at least for me, has been a cherished memory for some thirty-five or so years.

The sense of smell, and to a lessor degree taste, are two things that can bring back a flood of memories. For me, when I walk out into my back yard in mid August after a spell of warm weather, the smell of ripe berries wafting through the breeze takes me back to a simpler time, back to the Tulle Goose Duck Club. Then, as I pop that first berry into my mouth, I'm whisked back to the living room of grandma and grandpa's house where I can once again taste a warm blackberry cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top of it.

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These pictures are from my place. In this first one you might notice the nice clearing before the "hedge" of berry bushes. When we moved in, these came almost up to our back fence. After several battles with them over the years, I've managed to keep them at bay nearly sixty feet from the yard.

In this one if you replaced the grass with an irrigation canal full of water, you'd have a feel for what grandma and I would have seen from our canoe.

Ahaaaa...the prize!

This was dessert last night.