Blackberries and Coming of Age in Kentucky
The summer of 2016, I rode a bicycle from Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada, to Portland, Oregon with my wife Kathleen and five other stalwart cyclists down the back roads and rails to trails that traverse the coast of Washington State. The trip covered 350 miles and it took nine days to complete which included a two-night stay in Seattle.
To my delight it was blackberry season in the Northwest. If I kept a keen eye open, I could spot the brambles that held the ripe berries, free and ready to be picked and enjoyed. Stopping to stuff my mouth with blackberries, taking a little rest and replenishing my blood sugar, became a daily ritual. If I’d had room for a bumper sticker it would have read, “I brake for blackberries.”
Any seasoned blackberry picker knows that the mature and sweetest berries come off into your hand effortlessly with just the slightest pull. If it resists at all, it will most likely be sour. Leave it for the next picker.
Growing up in a farming region of Kentucky, I learned this principle applies to most any fruit or vegetable. When it’s mature and ready to be consumed, it practically falls into your hand.
The plentitude of blackberries reminded me of a hot summer day when the blackberries were ripe near the small rural town where I grew up. I was around 12 years old. My mother had sent my two older brothers and me out to pick some berries which she would freeze or can or make 145 into a cobbler. Of course, we would eat our fill while trying to save some of the choicest berries to fill our buckets, though more often than not, the choicest berries usually ended up in our bellies.
My eldest brother Doug had his driver’s license by then, so the three of us took the ’55 Chevy to a nearby field full of berries ready to be picked. Even though it was hot as blazes, we needed to wear long sleeved shirts to provide some modicum of protection from the briars. It always seemed like the best and juiciest berries were being guarded by an entanglement of thorny branches. Just as a bee keeper expects to be stung a few times, it was a given that you would return home stained with blackberry juice on your hands and mouth, mixed with a few scratches beaded up with blood. It was a small price to pay.
I recalled, on that hot summer day in the early 1960s, going to the car for a little rest and deciding to turn on the car radio. In those days you could listen to the radio without turning the key or turning on the engine. The smell of summer was in the air.
About the only type of music I had heard up to that point in life were hymns from the Baptist church or the occasional ballad from the likes of Perry Como or Andy Williams which my parents enjoyed, along with Sing Along with Mitch and Lawrence Welk. A weekly television ritual. 146 But the song that came out of the radio that day was distinctly different in two ways. It was sultry and sexy, and it spoke to something that was just beginning to stir inside me.
The song was He’ll Have to Go, written by Joe Allison, but made popular by country singer-songwriter Jim Reeves. Although I wasn’t fully conscious of it at the time, I was being introduced to a mixture of poetry, rhythm and melody which combined to convey a specific sentiment, and that sentiment was beginning to inform me of desire, heartache, longing and betrayal. In a few short lines, an entire scene unfolded in my young mind of a woman in a honky-tonk bar, probably conflicted and confused about her life and the choices she’s making. She receives a call from a man she’s been in love with at some point in her life– perhaps it’s her husband. He’s very clear about his personal motives and is letting her know, in no uncertain terms, he wants her back.
These sentiments are a well-worn theme in Country Music and it could be said that a majority of the songs bear some resemblance to what was being expressed in this song. Not to disparage the genre, but many of the Country Music songs I hear seem to be saying, “If you leave me, won’t you please take me with you.” But what I heard that blackberry summer was new information for me.
I sensed that someday soon, I would be in the mix of romantic entanglement and it would be just as prickly as those blackberry brambles. I didn’t know it then, but hearts would be broken and at times it would be my heart that bore the scars. 147 I would learn that some of the choicest fruit was way out of my reach and would bring only heartache. I would learn to be discerning and selective in my choices and still I would get stuck. Looking back now, I wouldn’t change any of it.
At the ripe age of thirty-two, I met a thirty-year-old woman named Kathleen who told me on our second date that her eggs were getting old. Her direct approach and lack of any of the sentimentality of Country Music spoke to me and we plucked each other from the vine, and for better or for worse, fell into each other’s arms effortlessly.
by Alan Hundley
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