By Edie Everette / Herald Forum
Here in the Pacific Northwest, blackberry season can get complicated.
It is a time of so much free fruit that we feel compelled to pick a bucket of these aggregates of drupelets because everybody loves free stuff. But this is where the complication comes in: Do we eat them as we pick, bring some home for the top of yogurt or ice cream, or turn on the oven in hot and humid weather to bake a pie?
In my 20s I had the energy to bake 10 blackberry pies at a time. I’d purchase a stack of those foil aluminum pie tins and go to town. I made my own crust because my ancestors are always watching me over that sort of thing. When these pies slid from the oven, I placed them along my apartment windowsills to cool. I knew to do this because I grew up on Merrie Melodies cartoons wherein the aroma of windowsill pies snake through neighborhoods at nose level to morph into a beckoning finger.
As a child with my mother at the Tradewell grocery store, my No. 1 treat was a Hostess hand pie. My favorite flavors were the blackberry and mixed berry because I was fascinated with their darkness and how, when I bit into them, they resembled the Carlsbad Cavern slide in one of my Viewmaster reels. That cavern — which is not even in Carlsbad — frightened me with its wide mouth that invites us into endless darkness.
If you decide to make pies with the gifts of this seasonal cornucopia, the complications only get more … complex. Do you make your own crust or purchase Ready-to-Bake (I suppose this is decided by who is watching you from heaven with their apron on)? How are you going to seal the edge, with a finger-and-thumb scallop design or with the tines of a fork? Plus, as long as you are baking one, should you just make two? If so, what do you do with an extra, treasured pie? If you give it to one neighbor will the other neighbors get resentful? And what about that diet you just started?
I am a maniac when it comes to blackberry picking. For one thing I never dress correctly, and for another I get into a primal, hunter-gatherer trance whereupon I want berries that are just out of reach of my two empty arms as Solomon Burke once sang. The grass is always greener, and the berries are always fatter. Because of this, a painful incident occurred.
One summer I took yogurt containers down to the railroad tracks to pick. I was all alone, reaching and reaching until I reached so far that I fell into the thicket. Pierced by thorns in my bare limbs, my only escape was to push myself up with my hands placed on top of the deadly canes! A tetanus shot ensued.
The older I get the less fond I become of summer. Perhaps I got my dread of high temperatures from my Grandma Tootsie who was miserable in the summertime and bitterly complained. I am also averse to open car windows with loud music pouring out, thirsty foliage that nobody waters and being exposed to bare midriffs that I envy. Alas! The best things about summer are swimming in the Skykomish River after work and … berries! I love to watch Kenny, my terrier mix, pluck blueberries, raspberries and blackberries from their branches most delicately.
I hope I’ve helped make blackberry season less stressful for you, dear reader, because nobody needs stress in the summertime. Enjoy nature’s bounty and, should you pick berries in a non-paved alley remember to rinse the dust off good.
Also, a few slices of sweet and seedy, purple-black pie won’t destroy your diet.
Edie Everette is a writer and news junkie who lives in Index.
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