We are really enjoying the blackberries that have ripened in the last few weeks. We are enjoying not so much the fact that this means summer is almost over.

However, the picking of blackberries always brings this family story about our Great-Grandmother, Hannah, to mind (told here in the words of our Great-Aunt Florence, her daughter).
“One summer my mother went alone to pick blackberries in the back field quite a distance from the house. She was busy picking when she heard a grunting and snorting noise in the thick bushes. She said, ‘You can’t scare me Dave, I know it’s you.’ She finished filling her buckets and came home. But when she got there, my father, probably reading, had never left the house! They later found signs where a bear had been staying around there, eating blackberries, of which they are very fond.”

This story was told often when we were growing up, and we never fail to think of it and share it once again, whenever it is blackberry time.
(Honestly… whenever we find a large patch of blackberries… we are always on the lookout for a bear.)