Roads to Joy

With any luck, if the sun shines this afternoon, after we’re diligent with a bit of house cleaning chores, and locally-contributive with a visit to a Producers’ Market, we’ll take a little amble into the New Galloway edge of the Ken-Dee Marshes on a blackberry forage.

We’ve been promising ourselves, for some time, that we’d collect berries for freezing, but if the weather is infelicitous, we may miss the opportunity for this season. Auguries are good, however. Considering the number of bramble bushes we’ve encountered on previous ventures into the dyked walkway, we should have no problem collecting a couple of freezer boxes full.

It’ll be a foray for the basic ingredient of bramble jelly, rather than wine, this time. Our blackberry wine was always the best hedgerow wine we ever produced, but the demi-johns and airlocks have not yet made the trip to New Galloway. Actually, it turns out that the delight is more the picking, and then the exclamations of amazement over how much we’ve picked in what’s felt like a very short space of time.

When the berries are there for the picking, and the sun is shining, and our bodies are able, this sort of foraging must be very near to the top of the list of joys readily available to us. The anticipation of that experience is pretty close to the top too.