Around here, the best fruit of the season is free and found in the back of the graveyard.
My youngest son was scared to death the first time I took him to pick blackberries in the cemetery. He wasn’t sure what frightened him the most, the idea of “trespassing” on cemetery property to pick fruit, the possibility of being followed home by “haints” who didn’t appreciate the thieving of their blackberries, or the idea of eating things that drew their nourishment from dead bodies. The whole time he whined, “I think we have enough, let’s go home.” He was mortified, terrified, and horrified, all at the same time.
He changed his tune immediately when I baked those berries into a coffee cake. He nicknamed it “cemetery cake” and became my best picker.
Blackberries aren’t nearly as prolific here as they are in the Northwest where my BFF beats them off with machete and Roundup. This stand of canes is the only one I know of in the area. It’s an old town secret that the cemetery is the best spot for blackberries and those “in the know” race to get there before the rest.
Megan and I stopped to check them a couple of weeks ago and they weren’t ready yet. Figuring that they would be late like everything else, I forgot about them until this week. I braved swarms of mosquitoes to check on their progress yesterday only to find the canes picked clean. I climbed through the brush to the oft neglected back of the stand to see that had been picked clean too.
Well, I have said it many times to my kids, you snooze, you lose. There will be no blackberry jam this winter and no cemetery cake for this household. Next year I’ll have to be more militant about my reconnaissance missions to check on blackberries.
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