Picking Berries

June was “the month that burns the berry brown” for Maryland’s long-vanished woodland tribes, but July is the month that turns the berry black. It is then that I retrain my faltering eyes to recognize the fragmented gleam of ripe blackberries, concealed behind green scrims of serrated leaves, or arching boldly into dappled sunlight. The first berry in the bucket is a statement of hope - it seems lost and insignificant. It requires faith to continue - faith, and a certain insensitivity to pain, as the canes greedily grab skin and clothing. But in the berry-patch, small actions lead to a consequential result.

Berry-picking takes place in what computer programmers call “real time.” There is no way to rush it, to condense it, to segment it into discrete sub-tasks. You cannot start too early in the season, or you wind up with unusably small quantities of berries. If you put it off, you lose the crop. You must be efficient. You must train your eyes and hands to pick everything in sight, and everything out of sight. You must also wait for the reward, for that slow accumulation of one berry after another to actually amount to something: jam, or a cobbler, or ice cream. Berry-picking is ill-suited to most modern lives. It takes too long, the pay-off is remote, it hurts. Yet there is no substitute for the taste of wild blackberries. The cultivated varieties are enormous, and perfect, and someone else has already picked them for you. They are not the same. When vintners celebrate the taste of blackberry in their creations, they are not extolling the tame overtones of farm fruit. They are sensing the wild, recreated through a yeast-modulated alchemy which bridges botanical classifications and confounds the senses. Those are wild blackberries lurking in your Cabernet.