Crazy Lady

This is my crazy-lady thing.

Yes, some of us do crazy-lady things, once we hit That Age when for some reason society turns round and allows us to put away the selfie-stick and be ourselves. We become crazy cat ladies, or marvellous jam-makers, or readers of heavy books, or formidable knitters and crocheters.

I am the crazy blackberry lady.
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This is what I do in my free time from summer into autumn. I take long walks through trodden paths and fishing-grounds, looking for bramble-bushes, surveying which berries will likely ripen first.

Halfway through July, I start carrying a large plastic jug around the south-facing slopes and the early-ripening varieties. Yes, wild blackberries do come in different varieties, just like cultivated ones. Large, loose-druped berries or smaller, more compact ones; long conical berries or rounder, sweeter ones. They’ll all go into the same pies and smoothies, but some are easier to gather than others, or are less susceptible to insect attack.

By now I’m armoured up in thick but ragged jeans, tough old jacket and long wellies. The first-ripe berries are always the easiest to reach, on the tip of each cluster, but any day now I’ll be scrambling waist-deep into nettles and thorns. Old men, walking their dogs, pause to give me advice, for they used to pick berries for pocket-money when they were children. The best month to go picking, or the best places to find them… all of which has changed in the intervening decades. I smile and do it my way. However long they’ve lived, they’ve never gathered anywhere near as many hundred kilograms as the crazy blackberry lady.
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My best place is down inside the river-bed, so long as the water’s low enough. It’s a scramble down a bank of thorns and sliding mud, but in the space of three hours I can fill ten litres, for these bushes with their roots in the water are drooping, heavy with fruit, and nobody else ever comes down here but me, the crazy blackberry lady. 

Systematically, I strip off everything purpler than red, clearing the bush as far as I can reach. I hardly need to check visually on what I’m picking, for over the years my fingers have learned to sense a good or bad berry by the way it snaps off at the husk. Poor-quality berries, mouldy or maggoty, come off with a blunt or slumpy feel. I drop them down into the water without slackening the pace of my picking. Filling jug after jug with the good fruit, I leave the bushes empty of all but what’s yet to ripen. This means that when I come back here in two or three days’ time, I’ll find clean clusters of fresh-ripened berries, firm, healthy and easy to gather. If you leave on the bush the berries you don’t want, they’ll only infect the new ones with fungus and flies.
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No, I’m not defrauding the birds of their food. There’s always a large part of blackberry bush that I can’t reach, and they can. I’m collecting and distributing wild-grown, zero-carbon food with no disposable packaging. I bake; I fill the freezers of friends; I supply the marvellous jam-maker with material for her work, and she sells her products for charity. 

Sometimes, while I’m out enjoying the sunshine, the fresh air and the exercise, I wonder when something as sane and sensible as this became a crazy-lady thing. Through most of human history, what I am doing was normal. Other people’s children wouldn’t have yelled at me; my friends wouldn’t have been surprised to see my takings; old men—maybe!—wouldn’t have assumed I needed advice.
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Perhaps that’s what’s crazy: I’m doing something that makes sense in a world that no longer does.