I’m a gleaner by nature. I love finding food in trees and on bushes. When blackberry season is in full swing, I’m there. I even wear a certain jacket rife with tears and holes thanks to annual thorny August picking.
Blackberries go in cereal, in salads, in cobbler, in pie, in the freezer – but my favorite thing is to stand in a bush and eat them one after another like a happy bear, thanks to kind neighbors who don’t care for them.
…Until the sad day that they start to go awry. For a good week or two before their flavor turns moldy or fermenty or just plain sour, one has to practice some ever-too-conscious cognitive dissonance. Why? Those little tiny, white worms that begin to squirm their way out of the crevices between drupelets.
If you’re picking, you don’t really notice any. But pick a bowl of them and let them sit on the counter, and oh my goodness, do they begin to appear. It’s an awfully quick life cycle happening in your berries. That’s when you know that there isn’t just one in every twenty-or-so berries. That’s when you know that snacking on them at the bush takes on a whole different psychology.
The other day I picked a good hundred of them for cereal and set them aside for an hour to do some work. By the time I poured the cereal, I could barely handle the number of little wormies I was picking out of the blackberry bowl. It was my last bowl for the season, and I can’t say I enjoyed it all that much.
The berries on our street are some of the first on the island to ripen in late July. Thankfully, because we have thousands of little blackberry biomes on Orcas, there are other bushes that ripen later and fizzle out later. But ours are officially toast. And I don’t mean on toast. Cognitive dissonance isn’t even possible now, as the berries themselves no longer taste edible even though their appearance is deceptive.
That’s okay, though. Apples are weighing down branches, and plums are filling my pockets. I adjust my gleaning locations, and I’m enjoying new fruits of the pre-fall season.
May your life, too, be filled with the fruits of the season.
To learn more about those little, innocent, harmless white worms, click here.
HI EDEE! I have taken a few trips to Orcas during August, with the catalyst being BLACKBERRIES!!! They are amazing from the NW! I was on Orcas in October, and even managed to find some berries still thriving near Deer Harbor. I’ll have to miss the harvest this year! Enjoy them for me!!
Yes! And the plums right now are so, so good. I don’t ever even buy plums, but right off the trees, they’re amazing! Talk to ya soon!