soliloquy

It's seven o'clock in the morning, and there's a beautiful woman asleep in my bed, and every man in the world should be jealous of me. But I can't sleep. The morning has come, and I am wide awake.
I step outside in my pajamas, with a handkerchief holding back my wild hair, and head for the blackberry bushes. The morning air is clear and fresh. For a moment, I'm not in Seattle. I'm on every camping trip I've ever been on. I'm in every book I read in my childhood. I am everywhere.

There's a scene in the book "Walk Two Moons" where the daughter and mother are out picking berries, and the little girl is frustrated to see so many out of her reach. The mother tells her that the berries at bird-height are for birds, the berries at bunny-height are for bunnies, and the ones at people-height are for people. But it's so hard to see the black jewels you've waited for all summer long, lingering just beyond the reach of your hand. The first summer of my grandparents marriage, my grandmother picked blackberries off of the gigantic bush growing in the pasture, the same one that grew there throughout my childhood. She had the brilliant idea of using a ladder to reach the higher berries. Hearing this, my grandfather said simply, "If you fall in, I'm not crawling in after you." The ladder stayed in the shed.

Blackberries were what I waited for through every hot and dusty summer in Idaho. They came at the end of August, and stayed only a week or two. But it was glorious. My mother and sister and I would go out in the morning, armed with long sleeves and plastic ice-cream buckets, and pick them until the sun grew too hot and my sister and I felt full and slow from eating so many. The cows would always mill around us, hoping to discover an unattended bucket. Cows love blackberries, and they love it even more if you do the picking for them.

The picking is hard this year, and the berries are late. Two summers ago, they seemed to be everywhere, from mid-July through the rest of the summer. They fell into my hand, along with several new friends, in the midst of a summer that was much lonelier than I had expected. We ate blackberry cobbler on a small boat in Lake Union and watched the light fade over the city and the water. Some things can only fall into your hand, and you can only look and wait until they do. And try your best to savor them before they are gone Some seasons are so very short - you blink and they are gone.

Sometimes I worry about letting the sweeter things slip past me and being too oblivious or busy to notice. Or too afraid of thorns. Or too lazy and comfortable (probably reading a book) to go out into the hot sun. Truth be told, berry brambles have stuck and scratched me many times. I've walked through that pasture many times, bucket in hand, to be greeted by berries still red and sour. But my childhood self was never dissuaded. I knew when a thing was worth waiting for, watching for, braving a few cuts and a little blood for. Books will wait. Cuts will heal. But when the berries shrivel and fall, only autumn lies in front of you.