Blackberries!
Jul. 21st, 2009 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damkiannaSo I was mowing the lawn, like you do, because my mother said I had to and also it looked and still looks like it's going to rain this afternoon, which meant I couldn't put it off much. It was cool enough that I didn't have to change into shorts, but I didn't want to sweat through my shirt if I could possibly help it, so I took it off, and stuck with just a sports bra - not my usual, but nice our house is surrounded by trees, nobody could see me and it really was pretty muggy, if not all that hot. And I was listening to music, which meant I ended up doing a kind of hybrid dancing-mowing-mouthing-the-words thing; very dorky, and always cause for me to be glad that most of the time nobody else is home when I mow the lawn.
Another thing on my list of tasks was to trim the kiwi - possibly I have mentioned this, I don't know, but we have a kiwi ... bush? IDEK, that started out as just a little thing next to the south side of the porch, and has now grown into an enormous monster that covers the entirety of the porch railing on the south and east sides, and has only been prevented from swallowing the north end of the porch, too, by some aggressive pruning. (There's another one across the lawn from the first that grew up the fence and ate it; it gets far less trimming, so it's sort of a mass of greenery with great long tendrils winding out into the air, searching for something else to strangle. I like to call that one Cthulhu.)
Anyway, I was taking the kiwi bits down to the compost, still with the music on, and that was when I noticed some blackberries that were pretty much ripe in the prickers near the compost. Now, those prickers are not very impressive; they've been there for a while and haven't really ever taken off, because we try to keep them trimmed back. But picking the blackberries I could see down there reminded me of the great vicious blackberry bushes growing next to the driveway, which had the beginnings of berries on the last time I mowed near them - when I saw Big One last, I think it was.
So I took the handful of mediocre blackberries I'd gotten from the little eastern patch inside, and found myself a medium-sized bowl, just in case there were a decent number of blackberries in the western patch.
... That medium-sized bowl? Definitely not big enough.
It was, like, blackberry heaven down there. Some of those things were probably as big as the last joint, the tip part, of my thumb, and there were dozens of them, I had to go back in for a second bowl. They were beautiful, big and shiny and perfectly ripe; they practically leapt off the bushes into my hands. My fingers were stained all red and purple after about five minutes. I got scratched a fair bit, of course; I ended up picking for the better part of an hour, and never bothered to put a shirt on. But it felt - right, it felt appropriate. It would have been cheating the universe somehow, to get so many beautiful berries without scratching myself up in the process. And it was fun; it felt wonderfully kidful, crawling around in the blackberry bushes with the cat, getting pricked and singing half-aloud to Vienna Teng. It was sweet.
And then, of course, the cat got bored with being on the ground, and actually climbed up my pants to get to my back, and then onto my shoulders, so that he could chew on my hair. Then I climbed up the slope around the side of the patch and onto the driveway proper, and picked a few last handfuls, and then carried the cat and a bowl full of blackberries back up to the house, with my feet coming down on the beat and Regina Spektor in my ears.
So. Today has pretty much managed to get itself categorized as a good day.
Another thing on my list of tasks was to trim the kiwi - possibly I have mentioned this, I don't know, but we have a kiwi ... bush? IDEK, that started out as just a little thing next to the south side of the porch, and has now grown into an enormous monster that covers the entirety of the porch railing on the south and east sides, and has only been prevented from swallowing the north end of the porch, too, by some aggressive pruning. (There's another one across the lawn from the first that grew up the fence and ate it; it gets far less trimming, so it's sort of a mass of greenery with great long tendrils winding out into the air, searching for something else to strangle. I like to call that one Cthulhu.)
Anyway, I was taking the kiwi bits down to the compost, still with the music on, and that was when I noticed some blackberries that were pretty much ripe in the prickers near the compost. Now, those prickers are not very impressive; they've been there for a while and haven't really ever taken off, because we try to keep them trimmed back. But picking the blackberries I could see down there reminded me of the great vicious blackberry bushes growing next to the driveway, which had the beginnings of berries on the last time I mowed near them - when I saw Big One last, I think it was.
So I took the handful of mediocre blackberries I'd gotten from the little eastern patch inside, and found myself a medium-sized bowl, just in case there were a decent number of blackberries in the western patch.
... That medium-sized bowl? Definitely not big enough.
It was, like, blackberry heaven down there. Some of those things were probably as big as the last joint, the tip part, of my thumb, and there were dozens of them, I had to go back in for a second bowl. They were beautiful, big and shiny and perfectly ripe; they practically leapt off the bushes into my hands. My fingers were stained all red and purple after about five minutes. I got scratched a fair bit, of course; I ended up picking for the better part of an hour, and never bothered to put a shirt on. But it felt - right, it felt appropriate. It would have been cheating the universe somehow, to get so many beautiful berries without scratching myself up in the process. And it was fun; it felt wonderfully kidful, crawling around in the blackberry bushes with the cat, getting pricked and singing half-aloud to Vienna Teng. It was sweet.
And then, of course, the cat got bored with being on the ground, and actually climbed up my pants to get to my back, and then onto my shoulders, so that he could chew on my hair. Then I climbed up the slope around the side of the patch and onto the driveway proper, and picked a few last handfuls, and then carried the cat and a bowl full of blackberries back up to the house, with my feet coming down on the beat and Regina Spektor in my ears.
So. Today has pretty much managed to get itself categorized as a good day.
