What Blackberries Mean to Oregon Girls

a summer micro-essay

Some see only invasive weeds. To my girls, this blackberry patch on the side of the road is their summer nights, at ages 7 and 10.

Overgrown from a neighbor’s yard, spilling into the street in front of the middle school. I know these bushes are a destructive pest, the bane of gardeners.

To my girls, they are the reason for an after-dinner walk, a way to forestall bedtime, a Tupperware bowl full of tomorrow’s breakfast.

In the evening sun of an Oregon summer, it feels light-years from November, when the rain will return and the skies will darken not long after the school day ends, sending my girls under their covers earlier each night.

A breeze lifts the rope on the school flagpole; the hooks on the rope clang against the metal pole. In the distance, I watch two young men descend a hill on the way to their pickup truck.

Their t-shirts and jeans are dirty and language rough — their shits and fucks tripping by us on the warm breeze. I keep an eye on them, feeling more protective every day of my girls’ ears, and innocence, and changing bodies. But they don’t notice the men, who climb into their truck and drive away.

My youngest daughter never removes her flower-print bike helmet, as her fingers go deep pink with berry juice. My oldest won’t leave until they’ve filled the entire bowl with new berries.

In 40 minutes, I will be home, hollering at them to wash your face — brush your teeth — get in bed — it’s late — I mean it —

But for now there’s no yelling, just the clanging flagpole, some birdsong, my girls’ chatter as they compare the size of their pickings. My shadow is long and strange in the dozens of photos I take of them, because I know these nights aren’t forever and that’s part of the sweetness.

I wonder if, when they are women, my girls will see blackberries on the side of the road or in the supermarket and think of these summers before they grew up.The way, when I think I smell a certain kind of syrupy honeysuckle — even though that kind doesn’t grow out here — I remember the girl I was in North Carolina, on summer nights when I was 7, or 10.