Seamus Heaney

Happy Saturday!  In honor of poet Seamus Heaney, who left our world behind this week, I thought I would re-post something I wrote shortly after I started writing my blog, dated August 3, 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!