Illustration by Tai Tan
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Every year – here it’s usually in August – a new stage of life begins: blackberry season. The strong, scaffolding vines have been infiltrated by neighbouring vines’ criss-crossing sprouts, all developing tiny fruits where the flowers and bees had been busily performing their dance. We pretend not to be watching closely and in great anticipation, but we are.
I always remember the first berry, perfectly shaped and reflecting the light from its individual drupelets, its flavour almost there but also invariably still containing a sour tease of “not quite yet, buddy.” Give it a day, or even finding a more agreeable berry further up the path, and the glory begins: every morning and evening walk now accompanied by the requisite yogurt container to fill. Even our dogs have learned from our ambling to perfect snacking on the lower-hanging fruit, the ones we call “dog berries” and don’t touch. Those that fail their canine quality check are mouthed and left intact on the vine, so that’s pretty gross.
Thick luscious bunches of blackberries, suspended heavily from hefty canes that clamber over each other, are desperate to offer us their fruit. The air is laden with the caramelized aromatics of baked summer. And there are just … so … many! Our farm has maybe a linear kilometre of blackberry bushes rimming the pastures and fields, along forest paths, up to 30 feet deep in places, so it would be impossible to pick them all. We even voted it the Best Blackberry Patch On Earth.
Contemplating my autumn garden offers moments of self-reflection
Berries are picked and eaten straight from the vines, saved in the fridge for breakfasts and frozen in two-pound bags for enjoyment over the winter. We’ll easily freeze 70 or 80 pounds. Their flavours reflect where they’ve grown, hints of cedar or grass, shade or full sun, peeking out even when eaten in February and a blanket of snow keeps the land asleep.
And every year, always by surprise, the boundary between what was and what’s to come passes over us, invisibly but with profound effect. This year it was an unexpected slow-moving storm that roared through our valley, dazzling us and frightening our dogs with vibrant cracks of lightning and rolling thunder that seemed to admonish us for any part of summer we had taken for granted. The accompanying downpour was short-lived but, at the time, welcome for its dampening influence on dry, fire-ready forests.
But that relief from risk also contained a more sinister message that we didn’t see until the next day: the end of blackberry season. The moisture bloats the ripe berries and activates fungal spores that have been lying in wait to flourish, until picking them is like pulling the last sticky bit of cotton candy from its paper cone.
Clumps of shriveled black sit amidst still-gleaming fruit painted with delicate, silverish mold filaments. So many other berries still hang hard and red, nowhere near ripe. Others are plump but still half-red on their back where the sun never reached them, as if en route to their potential but cruelly never having had enough time. I’ve wondered if blackberries ever torture themselves with thoughts of, “If I’d only planned better, worked harder… if I’d only had more time … I just didn’t know …” but such musing only distracts me enough to carelessly reach my hand around a thorn that shocks me back to reality.
I’m learning to live the ‘good old days’ right now
I’m hit hardest when the last of the fresh berries are taken from the fridge and added to breakfast. That’s when you feel the guilt of, once again, living inside the assumption that it would never end. There were just so damn many of them, lying ahead of us like summers themselves, how could it?
I suppose the lesson could be “don’t wait” or “don’t take things for granted.” But humans are humans, above all else, so I sigh for a stage of life I need to learn how to appreciate better … somehow make it last longer, or better, or more meaningfully. And it’s in that flurry of need rising to fix what I am, what we are, to find an answer to the tireless march of seasons, that something catches from the corner of my eye … oh hey, look: the apples are ripe!
Bruce McKinlay lives in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island.