Blackberries

Stephanie Humphries

The carton reads “Producto de Guatemala.” Some hard worker’s hand there held the berries, called them mora.

At home in the United States, I stand over the sink where I just washed them, cradle them in my hand, pronounce some of them ready, and pop them into my mouth.

But these are not the wild blackberries of my youth. The torus is absent. I have not climbed into the bramble nor been scratched by the prickles. I did not see the inch worms or traces of deer bites on the leaves while being reminded by someone who loves me to look out for snakes underfoot. The drupelets on these mora are bigger. They are probably the Tupy variety, lacking the flavor and sweetness of their wild black-cap cousins.

Blackberries are now a confused family, due to hybridization and asexual reproduction. My family was also mixed up, parents constantly calming the chaos created by seven kids, like that summer when I slipped and hit my chin on the red truck’s tailgate, biting down hard into my tongue after a day on my grandparent’s farm. The doctors advised they could not stitch up the tongue, unable to spin the silk to bridge the divide the way caterpillars create cocoons. My mother, perhaps to ease my discomfort in visceral ways that still work, advised me to eat only my favorite food for days— the wild blackberries we had picked.

I stayed at the table with my parents after my siblings had been excused, nestling the blackberries in my bowl, sprinkling them with sugar, wading them in milk. I loved to hear my parents talking as I watched the blackberries lilacize, lavenderize, purplize the milk before I scooped them up with a worn spoon.