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Blackberry picking at grandma's. What made me think of that? I suppose it is the hot, oppressive weather that is characteristic of July where I live. Intense heat is synonymous of summer fruit, the most popular being strawberries and blackberries.

Every summer at this time, Mom would get that infamous phone call from my grandma letting her know that the "berries were ready". Very early the next day, we would pull on long jeans, long-sleeved cotton shirts, socks and shoes, and dig through the closet for a hat. We would pile into the car -without air conditioning because nobody WE knew had air conditioning in the mid-sixties - and make the drive to grandma's. She would greet us in the gravel driveway with her "anti-tick and chigger" concoction, and dust us all over with the nasty stuff. She had metal buckets ready for each of us, and we would carry them into the brush next to her property to begin our quest for the biggest berries we could find.

There they would be, brambles full of lush, shiny, visions of juiciness, just waiting for someone with fat, clumsy fingers to come along and try to pluck them off without mushing them. We all knew that the mushed ones didn't go into the bucket, but instead went into our mouths. I was always pretty sure that my little brother mushed his on purpose, since he ended the day with a mostly purple face and fingers.

It wouldn't take long for a six and four year old to tire of the adventure, though, and soon we would be pulling at the now-damp clothing we had worn to protect us from sun and bugs. I'm sure we whined about our clothes sticking to us and the itchy bumps we had in spite of the chigger power. With the sun directly above us by this time, mom and grandma would finally call it a day and we would go to the porch and begin peeling off our sticky clothing. Grandma would let us turn on the water hose and squirt each other to cool off (I don't think she wanted two dirty kids sitting on her gold divan), while she fixed peanut butter sandwiches for us. Since we were still wet, we'd get to sit on the back porch and eat our lunch. It wouldn't take long to get sleepy, and before long mom would load us into the car again for the drive home.

Afternoons at our house in the summer were spent either lying on the living room floor in front of the fan, or spreading out on a quilt under the elm tree in our backyard. We figured out that lying really close to fan and singing into it would result in a funny sounding

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