Barely any cucumbers make it home because they are so delicious!
(Thank you to CSA member Hallie Chertok for the photo!) ––
The story was told a hundred times and always began like this: “It was early July, the beginning of the hot summer, and Mama had fallen in love with a handsome young farmer who lived close by to Grandma and Grandpa. So Mama went out near her home and picked two big beautiful buckets of ripe, juicy blackberries that she found along the river edge. She took those blackberries home and baked them into a golden-crusted pie with the blackberries tucked inside. Later that day she drove out to where she thought that farmer lived and found his house along a long country road. She left that pie on his doorstep with a simple note that said, PLEASE ENJOY THIS PIE MADE WITH LOVE and in small letters at the bottom she wrote her name. Well, pretty soon that young man came home and ate up that pie and pretty soon after that they were married and pretty soon after that they moved to this house where you were born and where we all live now. Now Go to Sleep, Goodnight”
Today, almost 36 years after that long-ago pie-baking day, we once again went picking blackberries in the hot afternoon sun, ripe berries falling into buckets with a delicious soft sound. We have picked blackberries every year since that first date, trying to find a moment to make cobblers or have pie-baking competitions with all the bakers at the farm. In my house now, making two pies, one for Grandpa and one for us, it is hard to remember that woman of so long ago. Such a full life, so many births and deaths, friends come and gone, children grown, some moved away, some living here still. They now tell the stories to their own children, in their own cozy beds: A new generation of storytellers and stories.
What remains the same, year after year, are the blackberries, growing faithfully in their brambling jungles along the fence lines and along our river edge. They are wild and one of the few uncultivated crops here at the Farm that we so thankfully harvest in their short sweet season. A time-honored tradition not to be missed. I think the pie is ready to come out of the oven. Goodnight.
— Dru Rivers
