…or how to understand life through blackberries.

It has been a truly fabulous year in the garden. Typically where I live the fruit doesn’t start until about now because the summer is so cool and foggy. About mid-July it starts to feel like summer and things will start to ripen, and then keep on until October or so. Which is lovely – I’m not complaining, it just requires a patience and faith in my particular little plot of land doing what it does in the way it does because of where it is. Acceptance.

But this year it got warm in May and has just kept on being warm (sometimes hot) and while I get kind of grumpy in that weather the blackberries and tomatoes, the eggplant, the fruit on the trees – well it’s been just perfect for all of them. And we have reaped the bounty of their happiness.

Every second or third day I bring in a basket of tomatoes, every second or third day I bring in a basket of blackberries. The same ones they sell at the local farmer’s market for a ridiculous amount. I feel thrifty picking them myself, and also lucky to have these canes in the backyard that are giving me such a valuable gift. Fifty dollars of blackberries every couple days. Smoothies, and on ice-cream, and plain by the handful, and frozen for the winter when we are not eating out of the yard but instead remembering and planning and hopeful of the future.

Most days I get home from work, change into more garden appropriate attire and head up to the top of the yard where the berries are. About that time of day the sun is sinking but is still just above the roof line and in basically a direct line to that part of the yard. It’s bright if I look out over the house, it’s hot with my back turned and my face into the towering vines. Start from one end of the row, work my way down, then back again because you always miss something, you always see something a little differently when you change directions, even just a little. I fill the basket in forty minutes with maybe five or six pounds of berries. A fortune in fruit.

Every day I pick I am overwhelmed with the bounty that is in front of me. I want to get them all because to leave anything feels like I am being ungrateful for these gifts. I don’t want to leave them to waste, I don’t want to throw away something useful that could be nourishing me, shared with friends and family, not something to just let rot. And every day I pick more than I can use that day but I look up and see the one, the two, the little cluster just out of reach – too high – too far back – and those are the ones that look perfect, those are the ones that I am sure would taste the best. If I ever do try for those I inevitably find that it is no better or worse than what I have already put in my basket and only have ripped arms to show for it. The same ratio of perfect and not quite right exists across the whole plant. But everyday I feel that tug.

So that is what I learn from the blackberries, it is the same lesson I am trying to learn in life. That thing that is just out of reach, that job, car, house, title, person, place, or thing that is just right there if you try a little harder is actually no better or worse than what is right in front of you. There are gifts right here, right in front of us that we miss because we are straining for the one that is just out of reach. I know, sometimes you do need to stretch, I’ve been there too. But a lot of times the thing to let go of is the thing that is distracting you from what you already have. It’s not wasteful, I have learned, to learn when you have enough.