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By: Bill King

I grew up picking blackberries. On one end of Mama’s hundred-acre garden was a big tamed blackberry briar. Every summer that thing was loaded with blackberries that were about the size of my dad’s thumbs. My dad had the biggest hands and fingers of anyone I knew, so in other words, those were some nice big blackberries. Even as large as those blackberries were, even in the bumper crop years, there was never enough. I could put a good-sized dent in a bucket of blackberries by putting them in my belly on the way to the house from the garden.

Mama did some amazing things with the ones that survived the trip to her kitchen. There she made jars of blackberry jelly and jam. I can still smell those blackberry cobblers she baked up in the oven. When we were blessed enough to have some vanilla ice cream to put on top of that piping-hot cobbler, well, it was almost more than this country boy could survive. Once those tamed berries were all canned up, cooked up, served up, and eaten up, I went looking for more. I always knew I could take a walk on the wild side and find plenty more. The pasture and woods directly behind our house were always covered with blackberry briars. Those berries weren’t quite as big as those tamed ones we grew by the garden, but all that meant was I had to pick more of them. I usually went alone, but mama sent me out well equipped for the task at hand. You see, blackberries are well guarded and put up quite a fight to hang onto their delicious fruit. First, there’s the thorns. Those rascals will bite you, and I do mean they’ll get you good. Then there are often a few snake friends that like to stand guard. I can still hear mama saying, “Watch out for snakes now!” Then last, but not least, even though they may be least in size, is that huge army of minuscule red bugs known as chiggers. If you’ve never played host to a plague of chiggers, count your blessings, count your many blessings! We didn’t have Off or some other insecticide back then, but we did have kerosene. As much as I hated it, Mama used to tie kerosene-soaked rags around my ankles. She said, “This will keep the chiggers off of you.” If someone had thrown a lit match in my direction, I probably would have lit up like a lamp!

Once, after I was grown, I went to Mama’s to pick blackberries. I was old enough to make my own decision about the kerosene rags. I made the wrong choice. In a day or two my legs had more little red spots on them than they had white skin! And boy, did I itch! I coated my legs in calamine lotion, I took a bath with Clorox in the water, I painted those spots with fingernail polish, and I scratched…and scratched…and scratched. It so happened that the following Sunday, I had planned to do a dramatic monologue sermon at church as Simon Peter. Like in all church plays, I wore a knee-length bath robe and sandals. My legs looked like I either had a bad case of measles or someone had used my legs for target practice with a BB gun! I was so embarrassed. Some smart aleck asked, “Simon Peter, what happened to your legs?” Without missing a beat, I grinned and replied, “A full day of fishing on the Sea of Galilee with no sunscreen and hole-ly pants!”