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The most populated city in the world - when major urban areas are included - is Tokyo, with 30 million residents.
And Now You Do
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8:33, Hear instruction, and be wise, and refuse it not.
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In my childhood days, the April rains around Kerens always brought out the blackberries. Berries appeared in the untrodden places—in the bar ditches along the roadsides, along the pasture fence lines, at the end of the fields, near the woods and waterways, and along the railroad, most especially the south sides of the railroad embankments. The timing of the blackberry season probably varies from year to year, but I think there were usually some good pickings before the end of May. We never wrote down the season or the time, but somehow we never missed a berry crop.
I write of blackberries, for that is what we always called them. Purists correct me, however, and tell me that these were not blackberries but wild dewberries, and I suppose they are correct. True blackberries grow on canes, but our berries did not. They grew on vines that crept upon the ground. I have since tasted blackberries, and our berries, dewberries, are far superior, taste much better.
I still call them blackberries, and our blackberries have three stages—green, red, and black. Green berries are too sour to eat, and the red ones are only a little better. The black ones are the ones you want to pick, and the black ones are delicious. One can hardly describe a flavor to someone who has not tasted it, but these berries possess a wild and woodsy sweetness . . . a taste that once enjoyed calls for another bite . . . and another.
Picking blackberries was in our youth primarily the province of childhood, perhaps too enjoyable and lighthearted a task for adults. My mom would send us, me and my brothers and sisters, out on berry-picking missions. Gathering berries was a chore happily accepted, and off we went, bags and bowls and little tin buckets in hand to reap the crop that nature had bestowed. We had two main picking areas, and the first place generally explored was along the railroad. Great expectations came with the picking, and in fact without the anticipation of a blackberry cobbler pie, I fear that most of the berries picked would have gone for immediate consumption! Even as it was, our picking was a matter of one for me and one for you—and the one for me was popped right into my mouth, and the other one went into the pail. A purple tongue was the tale-tale sign--purple tongues abounded in the blackberry patch, and I recall that we sometimes stuck out our tongues to compare!
Picking berries was not a dangerous task even though we shared the berry patch with snakes and terrapins, sometimes called land turtles. Both species had dewberries as a springtime staple of their diets, and occasional meetings were inevitable. Savy berry pickers took along a snake stick, and this you used to beat the ground and scare away the snakes. My most startling encounter was with a snake called a puffing adder . . . the darn thing seemed almost to stand erect on its tail, and it puffed its head up into a great large hissing ball! The terrapins were less scary—they just shut themselves up in their shells and, I suppose, hoped for the best.
Other obnoxious elements were mosquitoes, stickers, and poison ivy! No berry outing was really complete without a few mosquito bites nor without a few berry stickers
in your hands! Blackberries sometimes sprawled promiscuously through the grass commingled with poison ivy, and a berry patch like this was best left to the birds, snakes, and terrapins—a warning that you are welcome to ignore at your own peril!
Always the berry pickers looked for the richest sites—those places where black gems glistened among the leaves, those places where the berries were the fattest, those places where the berry bucket filled most quickly!
Under the best of conditions, we at last filled our pails, and back home we trudged, none the worse for berry stains, sunburn, mosquito bites, and the occasional scratch. The question of the day, once we arrived back home, was whether our black treasure was adequate for a blackberry cobbler pie, and of course we always picked enough for that because we were wise in the way of cooking and in the way of cobbler pies, and would not knowingly return home without adequate supply!
Mom’s blackberry cobbler pie was a dish to remember. The basic ingredients were berries, sugar, flour, butter, and pie crust. Cobbler construction involved a layer of berries with a sprinkling of sugar for sweetness and flour for thickening and some chips of butter, then a latticework of pie dough, and after that another layer of the same topped off with a latticework crust—strips of dough interwoven, basketlike, and sprinkled over with sugar and cinnamon. The pie baked in the oven, and the butter and berry juice bubbled up and the sugar on the top crust caramelized, and the overall effect was irresistible. Mostly we had the pie for desert at supper time, and we had it with country style cream—the thick, heavy cream that rose to the top of the milk crock in the refrigerator, not whipped cream and not sweetened-- just rich cream melting temptingly atop an oven hot blackberry pie!
Well, well, I feel myself becoming hungry for a serving of blackberry pie. Living away from Texas as I do, I sometimes begin wondering when springtime rolls around if it is yet berry picking time in Kerens. Someone bring me a couple of quarts of blackberries, and mix in a few of the red ones for tartness, and maybe I will try my hand at making up a home-cooked cobbler . . . might go down real well with a glass of cold milk or a cup of hot coffee!
Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
ivernon-ohio@att.net
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