"Blackberry Picking Time"

Okay.....we are now well into the Summer season and it's just about "blackberry picking time". Wow, did we love this fruit that God especially put here on this earth for us to enjoy!!!

We "kiddos" would gather out pales and out for the day we would go...."hi ho, hi ho, it's off to the patch we go". Now, we didn't go for just an hour or two...why we would go and stay all day. Our father would softly say....you kids are not picking fast enough.

All I wanted to do was go back home and play; but we knew the fruit had to be picked and once our baskets were full.....(thinking it was time to go home)...Dad would say, come one let's get more berries. But, you know what....I wouldn't give those days up for anything in the world. Special time with family!!!

Well, once we had all the buckets full and we had "splinters" from the berry bushes...we would just cry all the way home from the thornes. Now keep in mind, we didn't have an air conditioned car to ride home in....why, us kids would just jump into the back of the pick-up truck and away we would go....thinking to ourselves ~ what is Mother going to do with all these berries we picked. Well, she first washed a pale of them in the sink....then she would make us a blackberry cobbler! Now you talk about good!!!!

After we would have our evening meal; we now had the pleasure of enjoying the "fruits of our labor"....homemade cobbler and ya know...it was better than any store bought; because we picked the berries and for some reason that just made it better.

After settling down for the evening and we all had our baths, now came the time for our Mother to get a "needle" and do the dreadful; most hated job of all and that was to remove all the "thornes, splinters and jaggers" from our hands....ouch ~ talk about hurt. At that particular moment.....I said to myself, I don't care if I ever go back to another blackberry patch in my life. But, the next summer we were back out in the patches gathering the berries. And what was not made into cobblers; again Mother would preserve them into jams and jellies and of course, that's another story for another day!!!

For us kids to be so young...we didn't have time to be bored. There was always work to be done around the house. I would not trade those times at all for any computers; games; i-pods; cell phones. Life was so simple for us, but yet we never did complain about anything because we need that God was good to us and we had plenty...all that we needed..(not what we wanted).

All winter long...breakfast would always taste so good with homemade biscuits and our blackberry jelly or jam. See, it was a special time of the year to gather the berries to enjoy them later in the season; but being little kids; we knew of no such thing as later seasons. All we could think about was the hot, sticky weather and having to pick berries with "bumble-bees" flying all around us. I can remember my father saying many times...now you kids look out for snakes because they love the berries! Now, how appealing was that to us..."watch out for snakes"! My goodness, what would we have done if we would have been bitten...but ya know ~ God looked out for us then. Never one time in all the years of blackberry pickin' did we get bit by any snakes.

Oh the joys of my childhood....God is good all the time; all the time God is good!!!

Veronica....."I Love My Lord"