breakfast, the first thing you did was go gather the eggs. Not the eggs with babies in them, but the new eggs. Eggs for eating. You carried a wicker basket and you went through the gate, brushing past the honeysuckle, and walked down the path to the chicken house. You let the chickens out—they were bunched at the door, waiting—and they fanned out across the yard and the mother hens were followed by the associations of puffs that were their babies. You went inside the chicken house and reached into the nesting boxes to get the new eggs. They were often warm from having been sat on. Sometimes you had to shoo an old hen off her nest so you could have her eggs. And sometimes you reached into a nest that was too high for you to see into and you felt an egg that was big and smooth and it wasn’t really an egg at all and you jumped backward because what you’d just touched was a snake, which was having a nap after a snack of eggs.
To get to the blackberry patch, at the back of the farm, sometimes we drove the pickup out there. Driving in the fields was a holiday of its own. The grass would brush the underside of the pickup. Or, if we didn’t drive, we walked out there. Talk about tall grass. To walk out there, you had to go through the big pasture by the north pond. That pasture had tall fescue grass you had to wade through. If you sat down, the horizon vanished, the trees on the edge of the field vanished. You could see just a few feet into the grass and you could see sky. That was all. You could flatten down the grass to make a little sitting area. You could make a path to another sitting area and have two sitting areas and a path. Of course, once the grass was cut for hay, there’d be no more of that kind of thing.
They were wild blackberries. Picking them was fun for about the first twelve berries, then it was work, but you were allowed to eat as many as you wanted. Fresh blackberries meant you got a cobbler for dinner. You could also put them on your cereal with honey. The second day, maybe we would crumble hot biscuits in bowls, then sprinkle them with berries, then add milk or cream, then add honey. It was almost the best thing a person could eat. There was no name for it, so when you wanted it you had to say the whole thing: “Biscuits with berries on them and then milk and honey in a bowl.” It was a breakfast or a dessert for lunch or dinner or a snack for night. That’s what it was. It was all of that.
Many of the blackberries were frozen in the freezer on the back porch. That way, in the middle of winter you might suddenly find a blackberry cobbler cooling on the counter and you would go instantly wiggly because of how lucky you were. The berries had traveled all the way from summer just to be something warm for you to eat on a cold, dark night. And who knew: you might have picked that berry right there. That exact berry . . .
The brambles would scratch you when you were picking berries. Like how a kitten scratches your arms, even though it doesn’t mean to. Also, there were ticks, chiggers, and poison ivy. The hazards of the blackberry patch. You never saw any snakes out there, but for some reason you were always told that there might be snakes. A watchful eye was required.
It felt like a long way from the house, even though you could look across the pastures and see the house on the hill, residing in the elm shade. Still, it felt like you were really out somewhere. You knew the creek was not too far away. You couldn’t hear any roads from there. If you looked up, maybe there was a jet making a line in the sky. Not that you could see the actual jet, just the line.
Black-eyed Susans. Daisies. Queen Anne’s lace.
Summer sun. Summer heat.
Berries and more berries.
July 5: five cups. July 7: eight cups. July 9: a gallon. On the 12th: seven quarts. On the 15th: seven gallons. July 18: another five and a half gallons. The last berries were on the 21st: three and a quarter gallons.
Fresh blackberries, frozen blackberries, home-canned blackberries. Jam, jelly, juice.
Before blackberry month, there were trips to pick strawberries at strawberry farms. For about three days you ate as many strawberries as humanly possible. The rest had to be cleaned, sliced, sugared, and frozen. Then there were trips to go pick blueberries. And then you ate as many of them as humanly possible. The rest had to be cleaned and frozen. Or canned. Canning happened at night because it was too hot to do during the day, and it helped a lot if Dad was home to pitch in. If everyone pitched in, it helped a lot.
The shadows slanted across the yard. The shadows slanted across the garden. A horsefly droned past, on his way to somewhere else. The barn swallows swooped and banked above the horse pasture. They spiraled, dove. Their forked tails.
One flew right between the legs of a horse. You saw it.
July also meant sweet corn. And sweet corn meant an electric fence, which you turned on at sunset and it made a clicking noise like a metronome. You could touch the wire between the clicks, but not during the click. The click was the electricity, which reminded you of the story of your uncle and how when he was a boy he had peed on a long stalk of grass and the grass leaned over under the weight of the pee and it touched the electric fence and then the electricity went down the grass, then up the pee, and then . . .
Not a mistake made twice.
So, let’s have corn for dinner. July. You go with Mom and cut fifteen ears. That’s three apiece. The ears are medium-smallish, but that means they’re at their best—the kernels like translucent bubbles. You husk the ears, then boil them, and then eat them with butter and salt and hamburgers. The mess of it. The butter rolling down your forearms and pooling around your elbows propped on the oilcloth.
A pitcher of iced tea in the middle of the table. One pickle in an enameled bowl.
Then the nights of the corn harvest. Picking all the ripe ears. Big buckets and bushels and tubs overflowing. The lawn chairs placed in a circle. Piles of husks and silks, dumped onto the compost. It overflows. The stories about our pet hen named June who used to love corn shucking. You would shuck the corn and then hold the bare ear out to her and she would pluck off the little bugs and grubs quicker than quick, then she’d hurry on to the next person’s corn. She was fast, fast, fast. And never once did her sharp beak break a single kernel of corn. That was June the hen, she who was born over the warmth of the pilot light. True, you had given her a bath when you were three, and she had been so sodden with water she couldn’t stand up. “June wet, Momma. June wet.” Mom blow-dried her.
After the husking, we moved inside, as the dark gathered on the lawn. Clean, cook, cut, package, label, and freeze. Corn for a year. Corn and more corn.
A steamy kitchen on a humid night.
Size-wise, the garden was like the house times four. To run a lap around the garden was a taxing event not to be undertaken lightly. It stretched from the horse arena, past the mulberry tree, and down to the fence around the chicken house. A gentle slope. There was the corn, of course, the peas, the tomatoes. Green beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, beets. Sunflowers, radishes. Broccoli and cauliflower. Lettuce, carrots, and onions. Spinach. Marigolds at the row ends. Gladioli and zinnias. The asparagus bed. Rhubarb. Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries. Cucumbers. Lima beans and squash. Cantaloupes. Other stuff. Experiments. This summer, for example, there were watermelons, and we watched their vines spread out, and the melons started out like marbles lodged inside the blooms but got bigger and darker, and they were thriving and you would walk across the yard after dinner and kneel by the melons and when you picked one up it was still hot from the day. They were small, like cantaloupes, which was somehow disappointing, but when you cut into one it made a crackling, splitting noise and inside it was dark pink and warm and it had a better taste than any normal- or huge-sized watermelon you’d ever eaten, and you asked your parents, why didn’t we grow these before? And the answer was, we don’t know.
You could eat half of one of those melons by yourself and when you were done you had a shell like a cereal bowl and wished that you could actually use it as a cereal bowl or something, but that wouldn’t work. It would shrivel by morning. Which was too bad.
Also, it was too small for a hat.
August. Already?
We gave the terrier a bath that summer. One bath. We filled a big galvanized tub with water, back behind the cellar house. The water was surprisingly cold. And then we found the terrier and picked