Blackberry Season

During the second weekend in August, there was a BlackBerry Festival and Chili Cook Off held at the
local mountain community center as a fund raiser for a new park. We drove over and spent some time: tasting chili,
admiring and bidding on crafts, chatting with neighbors, and playing games.

Jordan Bear showed his ursine qualities and took part in the children's pie eatting contest .

Blackberry Eating
Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry -- eating in late September.


Big black berries
Hanging through the tree
Some for my tummy
And some for tea!
by Rachel

 Best of summertime heaven is packaged into small round juicy berries: 
the blackberries are ripe.
Warmed by the sun, moments off the vine; they are overwhelming. 
 Childhood summers spent in the hills and up the creek bed are inside them. 
They taste of adolescent years spent lazy and strong and chestnut brown in the 
town by the lake. 
It all washes over me and leaves me smiling and daydreaming of times gone by,
 well spent and remembered.
By Jen Walker