blackberries, found and remembered

Success in the search for blackberries…the great Greig Farm in Upper Red Hook has rows and rows. I happened to be passing on my way to get Concord grapes at Montgomery Place, over by the river (Hudson, that is, the big one). I’d just about given up on finding blackberries–the crop at Montgomery Place was taken over by some burrowing kind of fruit fly, awful. And they just are not grown very widely. Greig is a few miles away and I assumed had been affected too.

But there was the sign, Blackberries. And still ripening. Seems they brought resistant varieties from Europe, maybe made the difference.

Didn’t have enough time so went back to pick a few days later, September 11 in fact, misty day of remembering. I had the rows to myself, it being a weekday morning of weather not conducive to picking berries for most people. But it was perfect. It felt like I was back in Halifax, in my grandmother’s garden. I think she and my mother were there with me as I picked the big seedy berries, picking up the branches to look underneath where they like to hide, as Mum taught me. Better there in the berry patch in a light rain close to a large body of water (and one that is saline even further north than Red Hook!) than any memorial service, for me. There are so many ways to remember, to memorialize, to mark the absence of those gone before us. Sometimes maybe in the smallest acts and gestures of daily life, of simply living as well and best we can, do we pay them most tribute.

Blackberry jelly, inky dark, now on tap.

The berries have been hung and the juice collected. It was the first jelly I made, with long-distance coaching from Mum–you hang the fruit and…but how? What?? So it is oh so near and dear to my heart.

The first week of September 2001 Christophe and I picked blackberries out at Terhune Orchards, just before he went back to school, his eighth grade year. Jars of blackberry jelly and raspberry jam were stacked in the kitchen, waiting to be put away the morning of 9/11.

I saved a jar of each for many years, as if they were some kind of time trapped in amber, a reminder of those crystalline late summer days with their almost unbearably blue skies and of a moment just before the world changed, forever.