Late Summer Pleasures

I worked from Friday through Monday this weekend, for the second weekend of the harvest tours at Hendry. I got a tip from Gonzalo that there were still blackberries out in block 2. I had been bemoaning the fact that I missed picking blackberries here this year. Back on Long Meadow Ranch, I had access to a dry creek full of wild blackberries throughout summer every year. Now that I don't have my own patch, I have to remember to find some and buy them or find some to pick during that window when they are ripe and sweet. After the Hendry berries are picked-- they have a few hundred jars to make, and I wouldn't want to be the person who picked the one bucket of berries that would have finished the last batch.

At Long Meadow, it was such a luxury to be able to wander to the blackberry patch with friends after dinner and pick a bowl for dessert with ice cream. In the summertime, we ate them, still dewy with bananas for breakfast, in pancakes, in syrup, cobbler, crisp and pie. And quite a few straight off the vine, warm and sweet. This year, though we had a few (still pretty sour) in the northwest in August, I missed the picking and the jam-making at Hendry, and I thought the season had passed.


Sunday afternoon after the last tour left, I put a ratty quilted flannel shirt that the guys keep around the winery for messy work over my white polo shirt, donned a leather glove on my left hand, and grabbed a big white bucket. I stirred up a little dust rounding the bend behind the white barn. A grand tangle of vines topped the sagging wire fence, and I could see lots and lots of dark berries.

There are few times in life when you can stop and catch yourself in the act of feeling happy and really savor it. It's often a fleeting feeling, remembered rather than sustained. But Sunday afternoon, with thorns pulling my hair into a mess, the sound of birds and wind and creaking trees in the forest, and the smell of blackberries, I was able to feel it, and hold onto it. Not to mention the fact that spotting ripe berries and picking them one by one completely satisfies my compulsive side.


In about an hour of leisurely picking, I filled about 1/4 of a five-gallon bucket. My left hand (the bramble-dominator) was completely clean, and my right hand (the picker) was half-purple, scratched and stained. Just the way I like it. My cuticles are still a little blackish, but for the most part, I was able to de-stain.



Sunday night, I bagged three little quart bags for the freezer to add to smoothies, or maybe use in a pie, and cooked the rest with some sugar on the stove, for pancakes, ice cream and toast.

As the jam/syrup was cooking, I breathed in the distilled scent of summer: warm afternoons picking berries with the sun on my shoulders; sweltering August days spent stirring jam in George's hundred-plus-year-old kitchen, imagining the many cooks that stirred the pot over the years with a flat-edged wooden spoon stained deep aubergine; the summer week I spent with my friend Tammy on her family's ranch in Visalia, pulling stumps with a chain and a tractor, eating coke and peanuts, picking peaches, and of course, filling bowls very slowly with ripe blackberries-- coming back to the ranch house too full of them to eat any more.

And I thought: when I die, I want to smell blackberries cooking into jam. Don't have a funeral, just wait until summer, put a pot on, and stir it and smell it. Let the whole house fill with it, like love, like happiness, can fill your heart. Savor it, and smile.