This is a guest post from the Spouse. Everything’s been coming up blackberries around here of late, and it’s got him thinking. So I shuffle over while he types. Might go make myself some toast and jam…
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Scottish schools are coming off a mid-term holiday week. If that sounds luxurious to Canadian ears, know that it is recompense for sending them to school in the middle of August— definitely cruel and unusual punishment. Our Anglo-Italian neighbours with kids at the same school as ours rented a cottage on the west coast and graciously invited us to join them, so we did. Easdale Island, the smallest inhabited island of the Inner Hebrides. Its dubious Gaelic name is Eilean Eisdeal. Or, as the neighbours had christened it by the time we arrived, Blackberry Island.
Blackberries are always, for me, a sign of super-abundance. Effusive grace: wild blackberries grow without our help and in quantities such that it is impossible to eat them all. Solomon in all his splendour could never gobble them up before some of them are lost—wrinkled, mushed, dropped to the earth, eaten by a snail. Growing up on Vancouver Island, they were everywhere. We cultivated some in our backyard, but the best ones were found in remote parts—usually along the train tracks, a few metres in from the road. My friends and I would gorge ourselves on them in August (before school got back in), sometimes musing about the danger we were in, knowing that if a train came, the only safe option was to jump into the thorny curtains, which didn’t seem much like safety at all. But it was worth the risk for the ripe, rich berries.
I felt that same thrill—like I was getting away with something, like the Ikea ad where the woman looks at her receipt and then hustles through the parking lot, toting her bag and urging her husband to start the car—last summer when I discovered that the wall of our shared back garden was covered with blackberry bushes. Despite receiving no sunlight and poor drainage, the bush was full, and no one else was picking them. All through August and September, the kids and I harvested berries. We made crumbles, cheesecakes, scones, pies; a couple from church gave us a sack of windfall apples, and we made them into thick jam. Satisfying in the c’mon-guys-free-food/I-made-it-by-myself tradition.
The following winter, a family bought the flat next door and took out part of the back wall to build a door and staircase for direct access. It was disappointing to lose some of the bushes (and to gain competition for the berries that remained, but I would not begrudge them in the slightest) but we still managed a decent harvest this year.
Until Saturday morning two weeks ago, when Katie took the laundry out to dry and saw that all the blackberry bushes had been cut down. Every single one.
A neighbour further down the block had taken an interest in the shared garden this summer. She had arranged with a couple of others to pay a gardener to come and cut the unruly grass, which hitherto was only patchily tended. She had the gardener prune back two trees severely (trees our kids liked to climb), and she had put in small flowers, shrubs, and other landscaping touches. We weren’t pleased with all of the changes, but the demolition of the blackberries made me sick, sad, and furious.
It would be easy, then, to say my heart was restored stepping off the ferry at Easdale. Blackberries in super-abundance, dotted all over the island, and our Anglo-Italian neighbours wanted to show us every single one. I know the season is over in Canada, even on the mild west coast of my upbringing; but here in Scotland, where it is the autumn and the spring that are long, the end is only just nigh.
Our neighbours all love their food (must be their half-Italian nature) but their middle child—the daughter—lives for it. And every time she happened upon a bush this weekend, she would shout “Blackberries!” and call us very urgently to come and eat them. On an island she helped dub Blackberry Island, the occasion of yet another patch did not seem equal to the surprise and delight in her voice, but there it was, thankful like the tenth leper Katie wrote about just a couple of weeks ago. And really, I know where she’s coming from—me the stern parent, telling Blue to stop foraging and catch up with the others while I’m still grabbing just one more, just two more from the bush myself.
The blackberries of Easdale do not redeem the ones cut down in our Edinburgh neighbourhood. I am left feeling like Jonah, complaining when God deprives him of the plant that gave him shade though he did not plant it nor tend it; neither, I suppose, did he cut it down or abuse it. It’s just that God’s grace is super-abundant, for our benefit but not at our command. If it were, it wouldn’t be grace.
But when I think of the generosity of our neighbours that brought me to Easdale this past weekend, or even the neighbour who has been busily improving the shared garden, I can at least say this: people are more important than blackberries.
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Michael Munnik is the Spouse.
