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Blackberries The best blackberry patch on the farm moves from place to place, like my sisters Phyllis and Sally used to move their play-house. Today it would be on the big flat rock in the woods below the house, swept meticulously clean; the acorn-cap teacups serving perfectly brewed nothing to dolls, to wash down their daisy fried eggs. Tomorrow everything must be packed and pulled in the wagon to the barn loft, where there was new furniture, in the form of haybales, which could be arranged just so. A state of flux allows one to try out more of the abundance the world offers. That is the way it seems to be with blackberries, only slower, as befits botanical gypsies. Blackberries bear on the second year canes. Thus there is a year when an unmowed autumn corner of a field may sprout the quick single carpe deum canes. If that corner is missed or left alone on purpose, as we always do some, then there will be a young patch of bearing blackberries that summer. By fall the patch will have thickened with a new first growth, some of the older canes dying off to form waist-high gray tangled rabbit refuges in the center. The following spring will see the gathered strength of the patch shoot up enormous new canes arching overhead. Previously isolated briars join into one great thorny labyrinth, a nearly impenetrable realm; the green castle of the yellow-breasted chat. And he, who remains hidden in the thick catacombs of leaf and briar, scolds the human intruders like an elfin bard, lacing the kingdom of the blackberry with mimicries of the poor singers who have only mastered a single song. In the high season his song is anchored by the startling sudden buzzes and contented drones of countless junebugs, clustering in suckfests on the ripest berries. Over the patch, patrols of dragonflies and snake doctors streak the humid sun-soaked air, and higher still, rising in a thermal spiral toward the mountainous stacks of summer thunderheads, a vigilant redtail hawk. In a year or so the patch will decline. The refuge of scratches has sheltered young oaks and cedars that will pierce up through the patch to dominate the space and begin to transform it. Some of the millions of tiny seeds strewn willy-nilly in the scats of possums, coons, foxes, voles, and mice, not to mention the ariel bombs of bluejays, mockingbirds, and countless other avian eaters, will find their spot in a woodsedge or meadow. Up will come a cross between a barbwire and an antennae, vanguard of a new patch. (I’ll insert a recipe for blackberry jam, jelly, and pie, here. Soon.)
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