By Judith Roberts
I have hazy memories of sitting on the back of my dad’s back as we picked blackberries together.
He would hold a Styrofoam cup and try to fill it up with blackberries – he was never successful, as I could eat them just about as fast as he picked them.
He’d let me sit on his shoulders because the weeds were taller than I was, and he didn’t want me to get cut by sticks or thorns that might be about.
We both loved blackberries. I could always eat them plain, fresh off the branch, but my mom introduced me to blackberries with a little hint of sugar on top – that was a very special treat. We didn’t eat it with sugar much, but I remember having them in a bowl (as somehow my dad had managed to pick enough to bring back to the house) and licking the sugar from my fingers.
When Kyle and I moved into our first house, my father insisted that we plant a tree – it adds value to the house, he said. And, as we only had one tree in the whole yard anyway, I was inclined to agree. So we planted a pear tree. It took several years, but the last year we were in that house, we had fresh pears that we picked ourselves.
After my father passed away in 2016, my coworkers at the time honored him with a gift certificate to a local nursery, where I picked out and planted two new pear trees at our current house. It’s been seven years, and this is the first year we’ve had pears. They’re still too small to pick right now, but we are all waiting with anticipation for the next couple of weeks, where they will be big enough to eat – as long as the deer and raccoons don’t eat them first!
One of my favorite June traditions for our little family has been to take the girls blueberry picking. I don’t remember exactly when we started it – Alice was so little, but walking. She had her little strawberry blonde hair in pigtails, I remember. And I remember how little her hand was as she would go to pluck a blueberry off the bush.
Penny came a few years later, and I remember pushing her in the stroller down the rows and rows of blueberry bushes. She couldn’t walk then, but we could get her out of the stroller and let her pick blueberries, too, which she thought was so much fun. She wasn’t a big fan of blueberries then, but she definitely is now – and she’s such a sweet little chef, loving to cook and create things in the kitchen. She already has plan for this year’s blueberry bounty – blueberry muffins, blueberry pie and blueberries just to eat, of course.
As the girls get older, I hope they remember these years – they won’t remember them like I do, of course. But I hope they remember the pears they picked in their own backyard and the blueberries that we would get every June. I hope even if they’re hazy memories, like mine are, they’re still those core memories that they remember and share when they grow up, too.
