Blackberries

Lots of water makes them lots larger. A wild blackberry is typically small, but if the bush is in a low spot with lots of water they can be huge. That made that bucket full much faster. It was way hot picking, because we had to wear clothing to protect us from the byers and chiggers. Long sleeves on an Alabama July day was not cool. The bonnets we wore were cool, though. Grandmother made them on days that the rain kept us inside. They were made of old dresses or scrap material given to us by people who thought we were really poor. Grandmother gave that impression, because she had taken our family of four into her home.
The work each summer consisted of picking blackberries. The cow pasture behind the house had on hillside covered with wild blackberries. This was a chore usually done early in the morning while it was not so hot. Early in the morning always meant there was still dew on the ground and all over the blackberry bushes. We were to dress from head to toe in anything we could find to protect us from the blackberry biers. Then there was the coal oil that we rubbed around our waist, this was to keep us from getting chiggers. Chiggers are a tiny read bug that would get under your skin and make you itch, like a mosquito bite. It looked like a mosquito bite except there was a tee-tiny red spec in the center of the whelp. The red spec was the chigger/a bug. Yuk, a bug dug under the skin. The coal oil must have worked for me, because I really don’t remember getting chiggers.

Grandmother always insisted on me and Mama wearing a bonnet. She even knew about the dangers of sun, before everyone else. She could make a bonnet complete with stiff broad brim, gathered back and the perfect string to tie a bow in less than thirty minutes. The brim was doubled, and then tripled to make the fabric thick enough to stand out like the bill of a man’s cap. Behind the brim at the top of your head the bonnet was gathered to poof up and then a piece of fabric was sewn to hang down on the back of your neck. At the front a tie was put on each side under your ears to tie around your neck. Part of the decoration in a home has to be one of my grandmother’s homemade bonnets. When I reached my teens she had a hissy fit that I wanted to work in the fields in shorts and no bonnet. I wanted the suntan, it was the seventies.
Cobbler
2 1/2 cups fresh blackberries
1 cup sugar

1 cup flour
1 cup milk
1/2 cup butter, melted
In medium bowl, stir together blackberries and sugar. Let stand about 20 minutes or until fruit syrup forms. Heat oven to 375°F.  In large bowl, stir together flour, and milk. Stir in melted butter until blended. Spread in ungreased 8-inch square pan. Spoon blackberry mixture over batter. Bake 45 to 55 minutes or until dough rises and is golden.
Blackberries were always a pain for me. Blackberries are little and it took forever to fill up a bucket. We could not go to the house until we had a water bucket full. A water bucket was the good thing. Picking most everything else we picked meant a five gallon bucket had to be filled over and over. Filling the bucket was easier if you got to the blackberry bushes at the bottom of the hill before anyone else. This meant you got the blackberries that had grown twice as big as the ones on the hillside. The rain water settled in a low wet weather stream by the pond. This pond was the only one we had that had a stream running into and did not go dry in the summer. This was the best place to pick the blackberries. My little brother even helped us with this chore. He picked more cotton, but I picked more blackberries.