It was a cloudy and blustery day…

…and the weather service had been predicting rain on Saturday for a week with not one drop to be seen yet. So I headed out with a pair of scissors to gather wild honeysuckle from the fence row that has just started blooming before the long-predicted rain got here. As I was walking down the dam of the pond, I noticed all of the ripe dewberries that the birds had not touched. Handfuls and handfuls of them. I went back, changed into shoes and socks instead of flip flops and got a bowl.

For those of you who are not outdoor people, country people, southern people or whatever other kind of people you have to be to know this, dewberries grow on “brambles”. We call them briars. The branches are covered in spines and stickers, thorns. You will get a few scratches when gathering dewberries but it’s worth it. If there are enough berries, we pick them and make a cobbler out of them. By we, I mean, Mississippi folk. My mama has a snake phobia and is convinced that a snake lives in every patch of dewberries waiting for the birds to come eat the berries so they can eat the birds. She will not pick dewberries without a “spotter” in case she gets snake bitten. I figure I’m making enough noise tromping around to scare off any snakes in the vicinity so I can do it solo.

After my bowl was mostly full, I sat down in the grass to enjoy the wind. Buddy, the Boston Terrier, had came with me and was sniffing the breeze for all he was worth. Leaning into it, back feet almost coming off of the ground, with his ears laid back and his eyes squeezed shut, I could only imagine what all he was smelling in that wind. I asked him but he only continued to sniff without telling me anything. He wandered around eating pine tree sticks, dried magnolia leaves and grass. I tried some of his grass, it was a little peppery. I offered him a dewberry. He spat it out. Oh well, there’s no accounting for taste but he did protect me from the vicious and notorious mail lady as she delivered our mail.

We went to the fence row and gathered wild honeysuckle which is not half as happy as the privet hedge is this year. That hedge is ate up with blooms, blooming a month too early. It’s the same with the dewberries, they’re early this year too. Privet is a problem around here, an non-native and invasive plant that will build itself into green walls on the sides of the road that you can not get through (which is how it got it’s name- originally cultivated for privacy hedges) and is actually illegal to grow or sell in some countries. It grows wild here and has invaded the countryside. My mom is highly allergic to it and I’ve heard that it causes issues for people with asthma. Once it gets into a fencerow, you don’t actually need wire or fence posts anymore because the animals can’t get through it.

Here are the fruits of our labor.