Thursday, August 29, 2013

Brambles and sweet



There is a moment near the end of summer, when you can smell the blackberries on the dry wind that musses your hair as you drive past with the car windows open. It's the time of year when you try to make sure there is some sort of container in the trunk in case you have a few extra minutes to stop and pick a pint.

My childhood is punctuated with memories of snatching those drupes from the thorny vines. There was the time that Mom let us stand on the hood of the car and pick blackberries from the brambles peeking over the fence at the back of the parking lot while she went into the bank, and there were countless weekends of puttering on hot dusty back roads with my father, when we would fill hats and frisbees and baggies and cups with the dark berries, and stick out our purple tongues at each other.

It should be no surprise then, that I did the same with my kids, at first passing berries to their toddler selves, and then enlisting them to pick the lower branches.

In the final months of my father's decline, he was unable to leave the house easily, and so I stopped at the side of the road and picked a handful of sun-drenched berries for him. He relished them as only a dying man can. It was one of the last times I saw him.

The weeks and months before leaving to college are full of partings as well: goodbyes to teachers and classmates, goodbye to the explorer post, goodbye to the cello teacher. When Jr. Firefighter first started playing the instrument, Little One and I would sometimes play in the park across the street, where brambles weave their way up the madrona trees. Many of those berries made it into mouths and under ice cream--if they made it home at all.

And so it was that on his return from his final cello lesson, Number One came home with a baggie of blackberries picked from the same park, a parting gift, and a request for one last cobbler before setting off on his next adventure, where I play only a sidelined role.

A handful of blackberries. A parting. Pain and joy. Brambles and sweet.

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