Blackberry Crush

When I woke up this morning, I reached for my tiny sample bottle of Mistral's Wild Blackberry. With the heat of the summer upon us, even in the mildest way possible here in my NW corner, I longed for the dog days of my childhood summers. My mother would pack up every bucket and plastic container in the house. And we would drive the very short distance in the 1970's station wagon to the elementary school. Normally we could walk this distance but not fully loaded with what we planned to bring home. Behind the cyclone fence, and a long walk across the school's barren playground was the blackberry patch. Now to say patch seems minuscule because it was really acres and acres of blackberries and swamp - more berries than swamp though. We would meet the neighbors there and go in groups because it was so large that my mother was terrified we would get lost in the winding trails. I have never been in a blackberry patch as big as that one since but I'm sad to say that it is now a thing of lore. Development took over the blackberries nearly 20 years ago.
As a child, I hated picking berries in the heat of the day. Not to mention these brambles rose to the sky in mounds taller than my house. There was always a risk that someone would get stung by a bee or worse, stumble across a nest of yellow jackets. We didn't have to cut through too many thickets because someone had always been there before us. However, there was never a shortage of berries and we came out stained not just on our fingers but all over our clothes and shoes. You never wanted to go in the brambles without a good pair of jeans and even then, you were bound to get slashed and scratched through them. And to be honest with you, I'm never sure why my mother took us over to the berry bushes. She wasn't a pie baker. She despised making jam. So we froze the berries and if we were lucky they ended up on our pancakes in the dead of winter. But now that I am older, perhaps in defiance of my mother, I both bake pies and make jam. And what I wouldn't give to go back to that magnificent blackberry nirvana and pick buckets and buckets of blackberries!

In the meantime, to fuel my obsession, I am wearing Mistral's Wild Blackberry perfume which smells like the warm patch in the sun or my blackberry and orange pie.

Image Source - Apothica