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Blackberry memories...
How unhurried, peaceful and worry-free were those spring days of walking barefoot down sandy community streets and stopping to pick and eat blackberries. The berries were good; but looking back across time, I know now that it was the experience, the outing, the ritual that we pre-adolescence girls enjoyed most: the conversations we held, the warm sun on our backs, but most of all the soothing sensation of hot sand between our toes. It felt so good to squash that warm sand between our toes. What a pleasant sensation! Sometimes we sat under the shade of a tree, eating all the berries we wanted and putting those left into our pockets. I recall that I liked the red ones for their tart taste, though the succulent, swollen-to-almostbursting black ones were deliciously sweet. For the rest of that day, we had a purple smile. Sometimes our berry picking also included a game of Hop Scotch drawn with a stick in the middle of that hot sandy road. No more than two vehicles a day passed along those roads, so no worry about traffic or getting our Hop Scotch lines messed up. It was the late 1940s and the shade of those trees was cooler than anywhere else, inside or out. My other blackberry memory involves my paternal grandmother. Grandma Wood was a disciplined, structured person, who kept an orderly schedule day after day all her life until she was confined to a wheelchair the last 18 months of her life. She had linoleum rugs in her house and she mopped and waxed them like clockwork on her scheduled day of the week and she had it done by 8 a.m.! She changed her bed linens on a scheduled day and "sunned" her beds (mattresses) and pillows at given intervals. Have you ever sunk your face into a pillow that has been in the sun most of the day? Oh what a fresh smell! Breakfast was always before 6, dinner was at 12 noon and supper at 5 p.m. in the winter and 6 p.m. in the summer. This was pre-daylight saving time. And it was Grandma who took me berry picking with a purpose in mind; not as my cousins and I went, to kill time on a lazy spring day, but to gather the fruit for a cobbler. We had blackberry cobblers every spring, several times a week during the season, and never tired of them because they were so good. Actually, Grandma made it a point to tell me that the large succulent first blackberries were dew berries and the smaller, later, harder variety with less juice was blackberries. She never called the large, shiny, plump ones black berries, always dew berries. Now, my grandma made a "berry pie," as she called it, second to none. I have never had blackberry pie that came close to hers. Although it was a deep-dish cobbler, she insisted in calling it pie. I watched her make blackberry pie many times. She mixed and rolled her own crust and dumplings. She did not measure the sugar; just poured it in with the scoop. She added some water, but that was not measured either. Grandma began her cobbler on the top of the stove (earlier days wood range; later a propane stove). When the inside began to boil she moved it into the oven. Though I watched this time after time, I have never been able to duplicate the taste. Perhaps it was that white enamel round pan with the red edge that was the secret? Maybe if I had inherited that pan, I could do it? No.
Now when I take a Sara Lee blackberry cobbler out of the frozen food locker at the grocery store, I know that it "can't hold a candle" to my grandma's. Perhaps it was the love that went into those cobblers in my Blackberry Memories?
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