Picking Blackberries

As I was leaving the studio where I work yesterday, a man at the guard house offered me some freshly picked blackberries from a bowl. I had a few...so tasty. He told me where he had picked them, in a nearby field, but also that there were some along the railroad tracks. I normally bike along those tracks, for a short way where the road runs parallel and there are no blackberries there, but I knew where they would be. I went a different way home, so I could pick some myself, along a dirt path near those railroad tracks. The pathway is being flattened and levelled so I think before long it'll be paved; this may have been one of my last chances to bike on that path as it is now, that way I'd never gone before. Sure enough, there was a long stretch of barely picked over blackberry bushes, rich with shiny, ripe, bulging berries. I set my bike down in the dirt, crossed the tracks and started picking. I had no container with me, so I just stood there picking, eating and sucking the juice from my stained fingers. I love blackberries for a number of reasons. First of all, and most obviously, they are delicious. They are somehow an embodiment of summer for me, a marker and a result of long hot sunny days. And as they are a marker of a point in time, a moment in the season, I am reminded by blackberries that, as asparagus leads to peaches and plums and nectarines which in turn lead to blackberries, before long Concorde grapes, which I truly love, will be ripe. As well, around here at least, they are ubiquitous, one of the few wild foods that are readily accessible to be harvested by us city dwellers. But like the inevitable pricks that come with sticking your hand into a thick blackberry bush, or the disappointment that comes with biting into a hard and sour one, there is something bittersweet about the arrival of blackberries. As sure as blackberries ripen at the height of summer, so too will that moment pass. Those long and lazy days will shorten, the sun that has sweetened those berries to perfection will diminish, the berries will fall to the ground, and before long it will be autumn.