Picking Blackberries

It started out as just another Friday morning, which is of course more than all right with me. Friday is one of the days I get to stay at home and work all day instead of having to clean up and drive to Huntsville. I treasure those days and, like probably most of us, dream of the time when that will be every day instead of just one or two extra days a week. The way fuel prices are going, and the way food prices are headed, that day may not be so far away. If I just hadn’t spent all of my future earnings prematurely! Oh well, someday I’ll have caught up, and then if you want to see my smiling face you’d better have a photograph handy, because I’ll be holed up in southern middle Tennessee, and it will take several sticks of dynamite to get me out.
We had answered a listing on our local Swap and Shop page for blackberries. Or at least we had tried to. The way it works is that you can post something for sale, and it stays on the page until enough people put their postings after you that you get crowded off the bottom of the page. Sometimes your stuff will stay there a week. This time, only a day and it was gone. So I did what the locals always do. I posted an ad that said “Will the person with blackberries please call me”, and added my number. Sure enough, the phone rang, and a fellow said he had put the ad up for his dad, who did in fact have berries, and he gave us the number to call.
Okay, back to Friday (one of the days I don’t have to ….. you know). We fed, milked, ate, got ready, loaded the car and took off. The man whose house we were going to had said we might get 2 or even 3 gallons of berries, and I had begun to think we were likely to catch as many wild geese as berries, but we were committed, and off we went. Two towns and an hour later, we found the right house, and met the owner. What a gracious man! He led us to the berries, helped us pick them, and pretty much told us his entire family history. And it was uplifting and good. Here was a man who has been married to his sweetheart for more than 49 years, and for the last 6 months has been helping her recover from a succession of things, several of which could have done her in. He is very proud of the fact that he was able to go every day for months to the hospital, and then to the rehab center and sit with her, and it was evident that he is very much in love with her. She’s still recovering, and he cooks her breakfast every day, cleans the house, and helps her get stronger.
All this while we’re picking what turned out to be 7 gallons of berries, the biggest and sweetest I’ve ever seen. They are the Triple Crown variety, in case any of you want some berries, but I warn you they are much better for jelly than for cooking, as the seeds are very big.
We went to the house to wash some of the stains from our hands, and from Wendy’s lips (we may actually have picked 8 gallons, but our baskets only had 7 in them), and we met his wife. She is finally ambulatory, and a sweet, spirited, and witty woman. He threatened to leave her on the patio and go fishing, and she informed us in an aside that she has her own fishing gear that he knows nothing about, stashed away in the basement. She said one of them may sneak off to fish, but it may not be him. After 49 years, she said, he just may not know everything there is to know.
She told us that in addition to 49 years of marriage, they had dated for 4 years, and that she was only 16 when they married. Wow. They adopted a child way back when it was not fashionable to do so, and then proceeded to have a couple of their own. All have done well, and are still close enough to home that they can be a family. What a refreshing day, what a refreshing couple, and what a refreshing affirmation that people are good, kind and loving. We see way too much of the other side.