by Sandra Cole

Created on: April 04, 2008

A PRICKLY QUESTION: WHY DO I PICK BLACKBERRIES?
The late summer sun beats down. Mosquitoes drone about on search and annoy missions. My sweatshirt and jeans become soggy as my body tries to compensate for this cruel and unusual mismatching of temperature and attire. Thorny plants begrudge my passage, punishing me as I grapple my way about.

As I mindlessly picked blackberries this morning, with each scratch, bite, or surge of sweatiness, I questioned: why do I put myself through this somewhat torturous ritual at the end of each summer? What satisfaction could a relatively intelligent, if not chronically intellectual, individual get out of an activity dating back to primitive hunting and gathering societies? Then nuts and berries meant survival; early men and women didn't have books and movies, or even housekeeping to challenge them in other ways. Blackberries would be palatable to me only as an last alternative to starvation and I have a wide variety of more comfortable ways to spend my time. As my hand cautiously threaded its way toward a myriad of shiny black berries, my mind pressed for reasons why I, like Br'er Rabbit, gravitate to the brier patch.

The urge to pick and preserve wasn't passed down to me by my mother. In our early, probably none too prosperous days, I can remember her steamily canning tomatoes and green beans at summer's end, setting the colorful jars on shelves in the basement pump room. There they sat, peacefully waiting for someone to want what they had to offer. The following summer, when we would retreat to the pump room to get cooled off, I remember finding the same jars, dustier, colors faded to less-than-appetizing hues, still waiting. For a few years I think my mother disposed of the old produce, washed the jars and valiantly refilled them. But eventually the whole process was forgotten. The sirens of the canning kettle have never since sung to me.
I don't pick them for the money. In the beginning when we moved into the house, it seemed a neat way for the kids to make a little spending money. In a bumper crop year, our thicket probably can produce maybe fifty dollars worth of berries at fifty cents a cupful. But you're not even approaching minimum wage when you consider the hours put in. And you can't get workmen's comp for the stinging scratches, for embedded thorns (such as the one that's been residing deep inside my primary typing finger for the past three days), or for mosquito bites in places a lady can't politely scratch.

But in

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