Anticipation

Picked blackberries with the truelove last night. They grow wild everywhere along the roadsides out here in our little neck of the boonies. I love that he wants to do this more than I want to. I love that he talks me into it and we go off together like a couple of young lovers or old married people (is there much difference?), holding hands, toting buckets, devil-may-care.

You forget how brambly and prickly blackberries are until you are reaching for just one more juice-laden big'un and every article of clothing is pulling in a different direction because it's caught on a different vine. But that doesn't stop a die-hard, slightly OCD picker. There is such tremendous satisfaction in removing every ripe berry from any given cluster of vines before moving on, knowing that there will be more ripe ones the next day. Foraging like animals, sweating like pigs, paying careful attention that Brer Snake is nowhere near, we picked four cups or so before we gave up and trod through the woods to get back to the road.

So tonight we are making a blackberry pie with our harvest using some recipe found online that only called for ingredients we had on hand. Well, we only marginally had enough sugar, and couldn't find the cornstarch anywhere, so we sent out a mass text to the neighborwives and scored a few tablespoons. (Beauty part is that we found ours when we were cleaning up...) Who knows if it will turn out okay, but with enough ice cream, it's sure to satisfy, at least.

The hardest part is not picking the berries, although working for your food makes it so much more satisfying than buying it ready made. It's not waiting for the crust to reach a perfectly golden-brown state of flaky goodness. It's waiting for the darn thing to cool and set. I'm not at all hungry and have actually put on a couple of previously-lost pounds in the last few days of sloth, but I am READY for some dang pie. The anticipation is the struggle and the test of one's mettle. Truelove is going to want to cut into it as soon as it's out of the oven, but I'm going to try a little delayed gratification for once and see if I can wait until it reaches a reasonable temperature.

Then again, the ice cream cools it off, right?