She remembered visiting a friend who’s mother grew all kinds of berries in the backyard… small jewel-like strawberries, cloudy skinned blueberries and giant mild tasting marionberries. Her friend’s mother sent the girls out with baskets and they walked right past the painstakingly cultivated plants, sprinting down the block to an abandoned field where labyrinthine walls of blackberries 20 feet high loomed over them, wild and rich and tempting. They came back scratched, purple-stained and satisfied, baskets overflowing.
For Xen, blackberries always seemed alien in a grocery store. But they didn’t grow so readily in the midwest, scorched and mildewed by the long humid summers. Xen stopped her cart at the display, carefully tilting the plastic containers this way and that to be sure she was picking the freshest sweetest berries. She picked out four containers and stacked them 2 by 2 in the cart before moving on to pick out greenbeans.