August 1, 2012

Happy August!  August meant vacation time in my family, and each year my parents would load up our station wagon (five kids, no air conditioning and definitely no DVD players or I-pods!) and head to Indiana to visit my mother's side of the family.  One of my favorite memories was going blackberry picking with my Dad.  We would take buckets out to the pasture, braving those pesky chiggers (think mosquitoes but five times worse!) and bring back fresh blackberries for Grandma to turn into delicious blackberry cobbler with homemade ice cream.  It was such a sweet, innocent time, filled with family, love, good food and lots of pink calamine lotion for the chigger bites!  Here is a fun poem about that special time in my life:

Blackberry-Picking 
by Seamus Heaney
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.


Dad and I by Grandpa's fishing pond, mid 1960's

What memories make you smile?  I'd love to hear about them!  


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