Nights of Blackberry Dumplings

Blackberries are ripe. It's that time of year.

Unlike the clockwork regular and finely parsed schedule of humans, blackberries and indeed all of creation have their own, state-dependent, agenda. Not enough rain? Well, slow down and wait. Not enough sun? Pretty much the same.

But a hard, sour knot of berry after 2 days of brief showers, can transform into a glorious and fleeting taste of wine and oak and summer. That same berry after 3 days of moderate rain becomes a soggy, flavorless mush. So, if we mere humans want to taste the nectar that is a perfect berry, it is on their rather particular schedule and not ours.

Usually and in my own experience, berry picking is a group activity. There are many reasons for this; safety being the common concern. Copperheads, water moccasins, various spiders, toxic insects, rabid animals, are all dangers a berry picker needs to account for. So, as one picks carefully and studiously through sharp tangles for the perfect, fat berry, a barely conscious rhythm of silence and signal is maintained. Long spans of almost perfect, concentrated silence broken by a voice, a need to reconnect with others in the safety of the tribe.

These vocalizations are usually minor comments on the exquisite flavor of a particularly irresistible berry, discovery of a bountiful vine, curses thrown at briars, unsteady footing or the ubiquitous and irritatingly plentiful Junebugs. For all the disdain they draw in the berry patch, Junebugs are the most likely creature to be secretly envied by the berry
picker. It seems that the entirety of their brief life is taken up with sitting in the warm summer sun, eating the sweetest and ripest of the blackberries and their seemingly
continual procreation. If forced, in some future attempt at karmic balance, to reincarnate on the insect level, returning as a Junebug is at the top of the list.

Sometimes, by chance or by choice, berry picking is done in solitude. Usually, and as with me in this instance, early in the morning. Unlike the group pick with it's monkey mind, monkey chatter, the lone picker is left exclusively in the company of mist,
bird calls, dogs waiting patiently for a bit of too ripe berry to be offered and the heavy, fruit laden vine.

As I pick, I fall into the decades long body memory of practiced regularity. And in the unthinkingness of continual motion, I feel my consciousness begin to shift, ever so slightly toward opening. And in those liminal moments, I invariably begin to ponder the
grinding of snail shells on rock.

In certain tribes the shaman's apprentice at his upper levels, is taught to induce a trance state by increasingly simple means. This is after he is taught the more familiar, more traditional methods: chanting, drumming, dance. The blunt instruments, if you will. After that, it is a matter of fine-tuning one's perceptions, of understanding exactly the moment when the veil parts and transition into the imaginal space is possible.

Without fail, each method of trance induction involves engaging as many of the senses as possible. As if focusing each part of your conscious mind and each part of your body into this one, singular activity directs your physical brain to produce the brainwave state
known to us as alpha; a sort of light functioning trance state where movement and action is possible and for the shaman who is working with a patient, desirable.

Of the many ways this state can be attained, the one we are probably and unknowingly familiar with is sitting by a waterfall. With it's rush of sound, smells of oxygenated air, water and mud, the feeling of moist earth beneath us and the whisper of mist on skin. We feel light and easy and relaxed. We feel good, but we can’t say exactly why.

In another, it is the grinding of a snail shell on rock. The white noise of steady grinding, the rhythmic motion of the body, the smell of nacre flinting off stone, the weight of the body given to the arm and into the hand as it grinds. For me, picking berries in the morning solitude is much like this. Full of deeply concentrated movement, careful,
focused attention, the flux of insulated quiet and sharp birdsong.

Those moments of near opening, of being on the threshold of that other, unreal space, allow the mind to draw connections, to have epiphanies, to make discoveries.

And so, on this morning of quietly and studiously picking berries, as I have over many years and many decades, it occurred to me, unbidden, that in the innocence of my childhood, I had no realization that we were gathering the food that would help us survive in the harder months. It wasn't like my mother had ever said to me: “We must pick these berries so we will have enough food to eat come winter.” Although it was exactly the case on those rare occasions when blackberry dumplings and sweet tea were all of dinner.

To a child, blackberry dumplings for dinner was having desert without having to suffer though collards with vinegar. Again. Unlike the nights with only fried fatback and biscuits; which were a little more obvious in their poverty.

Fatback is a 2-inch thick, 4-inch wide, 5-inch long slab of pork fat with a bit of the skin left on top. Usually used for seasoning or to gather grease for frying other food. It is cut into strips of ¼ inch and fried thoroughly. The resulting strip of salty fried fat with the crunchy skin rind can be eaten, and usually was in our household, as a side to greens
of any sort.

Some nights, not many, but enough to create a memory, there was fatback and biscuits for dinner. It could have been the set of my mother's mouth that told us complaining would be pointless. It was what there was. However on the nights of blackberry
dumplings it is possible that, as children, we were so taken with the mere idea that we did not notice that the intent or reason behind the novel treat came down to a lack of anything else to eat. A quart of sugar-sweetened blackberries, self-rising flour, pork fat and water. Filling and, as it stands, nutritious enough.

I'm sure if, today, you could summon my mother's spirit to ask, it would never have occurred to her that she was teaching me a survival skill by educating in the ways and means of blackberries. Nor in taking me to the garden, nor in forcing me to pick
and clean and can on those days when all I really wanted in the world, was nothing more than to be in the woods packing with the dogs, catching crayfish or building dams across a shallow neck in the creek. She was simply doing what her sharecropper parents taught her to do. Garden and pick and preserve and survive.

Yes, over the years I kept gardening, kept picking and cleaning and canning. But more in the fashion of Marie Antoinette, who had her country estate turned into a sort of royal theme park with constructed hovels replete with livestock boarded in the shacks.
Here, she and her guests played “peasant” on holiday.

Like Marie's peasantry, gardening and canning were activities that amused me; gave me pleasure. That I could do at my leisure. That would have no real impact on my life if it rained too much, or not enough. Or if the rains flooded and washed away all my cropland. Or, as once happened to my grandfather, the hail destroyed an entire planting and I had to find money, sell the cow or go into debt to buy more seed or I would not be able to pay my lease with crops and my family would not eat come the hard winter. One cannot survive on fatback and blackberry dumplings alone.

It has taken me years of leisurely tinkering to learn the skills that seemed innate in my mother: how to plant just so, when best to water, who is unhappy in the plot and why, where the worm that has been gnawing on the tomato vines is most likely hiding and
finding him before he strips the plant bare.

And I suppose, in the end what concerns me, what has prompted these blackberry musings is a pondering on the future of food. And the future of a people that need it to survive if the rains continue to wash away our cropland or the wheat rust spreads or the price of oil makes the shipping or buying food from stores untenable.

How will they learn? Who will be their teachers, their guides?

We have lost so much along the way. Forgotten too much. Having grown up without want, without fear, without danger, we believe we are invincibly safe. And in thinking so, we have strayed from the safety of the tribe. Wandered off to pick in a sunny patch where gathering is much too easy and it seems for all the world that a time without plenty can never possibly come.

But we have forgotten the snakes. We have forgotten the winter.

Very, very nice.

I picked blackberries in the summer, too; down by the railroad tracks.

I wonder where they grow around here?

Thank you for your beautiful post.

I'm collecting food, laying up stores... but in the end, if they are not replenishable, how would my family survive? We have a huge back yard that could be farmed. But we know nothing of farming. We know nothing about keeping chickens and cows. We would need someone to show us, but in this world - who still remembers and could help us?

At least some parts - your USDA County Extension office has all kinda stuff for home gardening, canning, and critters - for families with kids, 4-H is absolutely awesome

links:<http://www.csrees.usda.gov/Extension/>
<http://www.4-h.org/>

sprinkled with a little sugar and milk. A true delicasy.

berries picked in the mountains and cooked with dumplings that night and then covered with homemade vanilla ice cream NOTHING BETTER

No kiddin' - My Dad's family is from Unity, in fact, today's rally took place between my Uncle's house and the school, and across the road from where my Gram and Gramp's house stood.
I still remember goi'n up Mica Mine road to the "Blueberry lot" and picking dark, sweet little high-bush berries into a lard pail, hooked to my belt. Grammy's homemade applesauce cake, a little chunky with fresh made applesauce and "frosted" with powdered sugar sprinkeld through a paper lace doily.
I ain't gotta tell ya the rest.....

The Pacific Northwest is full of blackberries. No awful snakes.

Here, we're subtropical. Lots of nasty, bite-y things. And I didn't even include rattlesnakes in the story because it didn't work, flow-wise.

Chiggers, ticks, oodles of spiders, horse flies (which hurt like a MF when they bite, the dogs yelp like they've been shot....) "sweat bees", regular bees, mosquitoes, hornets (OMG) which can bite and sting at the same time, and other little nasties. Then there's poison oak, poison ivy, etc...


Is it any wonder Southerners can be so contrary?

non-toxic and easy to kill, though.

if you can stand the thought of doing it to them. And yes we have a lot of them here. Ugggggggh!

No rattlesnakes that I know of.

Thanks for sharing about the blackberries. Nice seeing you posted as its own OP.

our hard time food was water gravy and biscuits, when we were lucky they accompanied one of our home-grown chickens fried up. Beans and cornbread were also hard time food, but we had them in the good times as well. the beans were often seasoned with fat back or salt back. My mother cooked greens, and my father and her loved them but I always refused to eat them. I thought it was just grass or something, anyway, she didn't force me to and I would eat whatever else we might have. We raised chickens so we usually had eggs. We gardened, picked blackberries, gooseberries, apples, pears and even walnuts off the ground. In winter, there was no store where you went and bought fresh fruit. We ate what we called 'poor man apples' which was peeled raw potatoes.

My father had during the depression hunted for rabbits and sold his kill door to door. He also did this with fish after spending the day fishing. My mother cooked from scratch, and here scratch means nothing. She could take nothing and come up with something. We also had a neighborhood system. If you saw a neighbor having trouble making it, they did you the favor of taking your extra vegtables from your garden that you were just too tired of canning to continue. ;) We survived and did it well sometimes and not so well other times.

There was a time in my adult life that I did the same thing as far as gardening and canning, but now I am not physically able to stand long enough to can or even cook complicated dishes, and we rent our house with no space for gardening. What we will do this winter, I have no idea. We will just have to wait and see. Heaven help us all.

You lined that out beautifully.
Thank you.