Blackberry penance

For the past six years, I have made my offering to the food gods. I have braved the massive brambles, thorns and stabbing branches of the wild Oregon blackberry bushes to pick my own blackberries. It has been been an exercise that has left me scratched and marred, yet exultant.

I have felt like an ancient gatherer... actually working for that food instead of mindlessly and easily purchasing and consuming it - without any respectful thought for how it came to be grown, harvested and transported. I have tried to pay for 364 days of laziness with one sweaty day of carefully choosing and plucking those tender, fat little juicy fruits. Penance through blackberries.

The bushes grow everywhere along the roads in Oregon, particularly in Southern Oregon where we vacation every year. My favorite spot is near the Applegate River, where the bushes are twenty feet deep, separating the road from the river banks. To get to the really good berries, you have to go deep... away from where the casual picker stops to grab a few roadside morsels. You gave to hack and climb and duck - and pull your shirt off of branches and thorns. You get stabbed and poked and jabbed.... and spots of berry juice partner with blood on your clothes.

I wear jeans - my oldest pair, because they are sure to get stained with juice. The shoes will be a loss after the picking too, so I always save a pair that is a day away from the trash bin just to bring for the picking. It's always too hot for long sleeves - so my arms will get to brandish the field wounds for days after. I can't do gloves - because they won't let you squeeze the berries (just a little) to test for proper ripeness.

I take two buckets and my music and disappear into the thorns, lost in the solitude and tranquility of the repetitive picking. Mindless of the passing cars. Set in a trance by the sounds of the river, and the bees and the birds. I pick until the buckets are almost full. It takes most of the afternoon. Such a small price to pay for such reward... and still more effort than I have to exert for anything else that hits our table.

Then I take them back to my mother-in-law's house to wash them. I carefully pick out all of the leaves and stem bits... and other things that will muck up the jam. Then I cook those berries, batch after batch with sugar and pectin, and a drop of lemon juice, pouring the finished product into hot, sterile jars. They spend the night standing on their heads, so the lids will seal well. Then I pass out the jars like I was special.

It's fantastic to pull out a jar from time to time, and taste summer on your pancakes or on vanilla ice cream.... or on warm sourdough toast some winter morning.

Alas, I could not serve my penance this year. The blackberries were stubbornly late... still small and red and hard when we made our trek through Oregon. They will be ripe three weeks from now when I am nowhere near them. My last jar of jam from last summer will have to last. Or, I'll have to go apple picking in the fall and learn to make apple butter. Seems like a bad idea not to do some type of penance, after all.

What is this supposed to be?

I have been stymied. Wanting to write... but confusing myself about what the purpose is. I thought this was for me. Just for me. Because I want to reflect on things, and put meaning to them and remember them. And because I can types faster than I can write by hand in a paper journal. So, I guess it is for others to... to read when I am old or dead.

But in this blogger world, it seems that people write for the Public. Instead of writing about the mundanities of their lives in whole meal size, they try to find the juicy morsel that can be spritzed up and made good for public display. An amuse bouche, with lots of flavor and layers... and opposed to my crock-pot entry with protein and potatoes nad veggies all in a thick gravy.

I've read these blogs. I've followed links from the few blogs I actually know from personal friends. I've just wandered the blogosphere reading different things. It's a guilty pleasure actually. I am so amazed by people's ability to write. So much talent out there. It feels a bit pornographic - stealing glimpses inside people's private worlds. And yet... it's not a raw, homemade sex tape thing. It's shot with glamour lights, and edited for public consumption. That word again. Public. These blogs seem edited, culled, perfected. Things I do not feel so much about myself.

So, I'm not sure what this is for. At this point, my little blog is still in the closet. Just for me. So I don't have to be too freaked about whether my style is good, my theme important, my meaning worthy. Just my little mundanities for me.

Collections

As I was cleaning at my mom's house a few weeks back, I was tearing through boxes - trying to find more things to throw away. Trying to make more space, a more manageable space for her... and selfishly, for me, a better place to visit. There were boxes of pictures, boxes of cookbooks, boxes of dirty shoes and half empty vitamin bottles. And then in one box... a collection of little ceramic miniature figurines. Little dogs and raccoons and penguins. Why? Who would have such a thing?

They were mine, I remembered. Mine from when I was a child. And in a rush of memory, I could see the display box up on my bedroom wall - each little empty square the perfect home for one of my little china friends. As I wondered when they had finally been taken down to make room for something else (A calendar? A poster or a photo of some boy?), I also wondered at the fact that I had not missed them. Seriously- there has not been a moment in the last fifteen (or 20) years that I have wished for those little dustables.

That led to wondering why had I collected them in the first place? Why do people feel the need to collect a bunch of some certain thing? Some people collect spoons. Some people stamps. I guess I can see that those items could be souvenirs from trips you've taken and that others have taken - a three dimensional, self-explanatory scrapbook. But other people collect Elvis memorabilia... or teapots.... or train signs... or even something gross like fingernail clippings. Is it the same desire that leads one person to collect Hello Kitty crap, as the one that leads another to save owl bones?

Looking back - in my case, the collections were sometimes imposed upon me. Somebody wanted me to start collecting something so that they would always know what to get for me. I had keychains - so anytime we ever went anywhere, there was never a fight or whining at the souvenir stand - it was always a keychain. I had a doll collection - and I received them ceremoniously at birthdays and holidays - and they sat on an open shelf on the wall opposite my bed, staring at me in the dark of night - preparing to come alive and climb down to pull my hair or stab me with the keychains. I think I liked them....no, I did like them. It made me feel special to have those dolls.

And of course - there were the little figurines, which were a favorite gift to be given by the older people in my life - grandparents and great-aunts and uncles - who seemed to really cherish those little things. I always reminded myself when they joyfully gave me one, how lucky I was - because they certainly never had such an abundance of things in their own childhoods.

So maybe that is it too? Having a bunch of things makes us feel safe, and wealthy? It separates us from children in older generations, and children now - who have nothing to collect and no means of procuring such an abundance of....stuff.

Or is it an identity thing? When we are children and the struggling to find an identity as a teen.... we can "be" something easily by means of a collection. Hey, that's that girl that has all those postcards! Hey, that dude has an entire collection of mint condition KISS dolls!

As I have grown older - those collections have been boxed and stored away in my memory and the closet. I did feel a twinge, if only momemtarilty as I stealthily dumped that box of figurines in the garage sale pile. Mostly, I knew it would make my mom sad. But my childhood, my security, my identity - my memories - are not in those little dogs and porcupines. I wouldn't claim to have a going collection of anything at the moment.... and apparently, I don't miss it one bit.

Mundanity

The word came to me as I pondered what my life is now. I am a mother, wife, friend, daughter, volunteer, worker-bee.... I am not out of this world. I am fairly grounded in a life of soccer games, crock-pot dinners, and glasses of wine on the patio. I follow a steady rhythm, keeping time with safety and satisfaction. And I'm not complaining. I enjoy the everyday, and I find glory in it. The spectacular, to me, in resting in the commonplace, if you choose to look.

I actually thought it was not a word at all. I thought it had a nice ring to it - sort of like a Cirque show in Vegas - it would give a flavor of zing and pizzazz to spice up the tales of being on the verge of forty with three kids. But I thought the true word to describe the everyday was "mundaneness". Turns out the actual definition provided a nice surprise... and the perfect tag for my little musings.

There is this:
(noun) : ordinariness. The quality of being commonplace and ordinary.

But there is also this!
(noun) Sophistication. The quality of being intellectually sophisticated through cultivation or experience or disillusionment.

What a wonderful oxymoron! Totally commonplace, yet wordly and sophisticated! And that is in essence, a wonderful description for the ying and yang of life. Black and White. Hot and Cold. Up and Down. Totally happy and filled with depair. I can be the mom of turkey sandwiches on wheat, and still have thoughts about existentialism if I please. They are NOT mutually exclusive after all. I love it!

Mundanity. That's me.