Brambles

By Becky Nelson
Bramblings
I am going on the second week of picking wild blackberries, and have enjoyed three or four full pints of the luscious berries that the bear has not snagged, as I recently wrote. The bold bear is becoming a bit of a concern, as the blackberry patch is a mere twenty feet from the corner of my house. I am not pleased to share my bounty of nature with a bear, but am more concerned about the ripening cornfield about one hundred feet beyond. But back to berries.

My dad used to love to go berry picking every August. When he tired of picking vegetables, grubbing around in the dirt with a hoe or picking up hay, he would grab his berry bucket and a large caliber revolver and head for the hills. He carried the revolver in case he met a bear, as he had encountered bears in and around his favorite berry holes before. Able to back out and make a quiet exit, he had never needed the gun, but he took no chances as startled bears, or protective bears can be a problem.

Dad knew every nook and cranny around the farm woods that held a plot of blackberries. A naturalist at heart, he spent many hours checking fence lines and property boundaries and doing a bit of “hunting” so he could be out and observing the natural order of things. He never hunted much, or at least not often came home with game, as I think he found the wonder in the wander, not in the hunting. He would likely come home with a tale of a deer and fawn seen or a woodcock taking off from under his feet in the gloom and shadow of his walk home, and would always come home with a bucket brimming with blackberries from these late summer walkabouts.

I have been too busy, or so I tell myself, to take the time for a woods walk to look for blackberries. A family favorite, we rinse them and tuck them in the fridge for cereal topping, muffin ingredients, pie filling, occasional snacking, or my favorite…alone in a bowl of milk for breakfast.

There is a lot of competition for wild blackberries. Bugs, birds, raccoons, coyotes, bears…all love the berries. Sometimes blackberry thickets are called brambles, and this is the reason I chose to call this column bramblings. Like my Dad, I love these brambles and the succulent berries they harbor. Crawling into the mess of canes is like crawling into razor wire, however. It is pretty easy to stretch and shuffle into the thicket, but oh, so difficult to escape as the thorns all along the canes catch on your clothing and tear at your skin.

I also love the ramblings my father taught me to enjoy, and the many hidden adventures a simple walk in the woods can provide. Putting the two together…brambles and ramblings, I came up with bramblings. The name is mostly because I feel it best describes the workings in my mind. If I have a question, it becomes a quest, and I often find myself pulled into the pursuit of an answer and trapped in the search by distractions and interesting tidbits around me, pulling on my thoughts and turning me in different directions like those thorns in a bramble patch and landing me in a very different thought than the one I set out to track. I feel the need for rambling about the forests, streams and hidden places on many occasions, too, finding comfort in the quiet, natural places. Like my Dad before me, I usually come back with a story or a trinket like a bucket of blackberries or a pretty stone I found in the brook to share with the family. Whether or not they share my enthusiasm for my rambles or my trinkets, they are very kind and seem interested and put up with my idiocyncracies. Bramblings. certainly fits the way I think and feel. As a side note, or a brambling, I learned only recently that there is a real brambling in addition to my contraction. Bramblings are small finch-like birds found in Europe and Asia and less commonly, Alaska. I may just need to take a rambling trip to Europe or Alaska for a brambling sighting.