The blueberry jam backstory

Three humble jars of homemade wild forest blueberry jam sit in the coolness of our apartment thanks to a clash 300km east of here between a bridge construction crew and technology gone wild.

We were staying for the weekend near a lake in a small corner of eastern Germany because an old friend from our Hong Kong days was celebrating his 60th birthday.  It was a huge bash.  He’d invited his whole extended family and everyone he’d known from those days, so there was a good crowd of more than 120 people.  We were all crammed into a discotheque in this tiny town that didn’t seem to have much else going for it aside from being surrounded by wonderful rolling countryside of forests and farms linked by shady roads lined with thick oak trees centuries old.

The party got off well and people danced and sang and talked and drank a bit so that most everyone was well-oiled by the time it was to take our leave.

The next day I had to be at work at 4 in the afternoon, so we tried to time our departure so that we’d be back in Hamburg with not too much time to spare.

We were using our GPS to find our way through the back roads of the former East, but after a half-hour of driving, we’d run into a problem.  The GPS gizmo was telling us to take a turnoff to a road that was blocked for construction work a little further on.  Unable to take the turnoff, we kept driving straight, but after five minutes of the machine blabbering on about how we really must turn around and plow into that construction crew, we turned the thing off, eased to the side of the road and found crammed in the glove compartment one of those things that in the past always proved useful , even if you could never fold them back up the right way.

A map!

TURN HERE! my wife said almost as soon as we got up to speed again, so I turned sharp right onto a narrow, one-lane road leading into a pine forest.  It was paved, with wide shoulders, so we were making good time, but after a few minutes we came upon a couple of cars parked off to the side, so we slowed down.

There were people off in the forest bent over and looking at the ground.

“Hey, I know what they’re doing,” said my wife.  “They’re picking BLUEBERRIES.”

So we parked the car a bit further along and rummaged around til we found a couple of containers, and got to picking some ourselves.  After an hour we’d had enough – about a pound and a half as it turned out – and headed out on our way again.

The whole time I was telling myself I should stop the berry-picking and go back to the car to get the camera, because the scene was so idyllic.  A forest thick enough for shade but leaving dappled noonday summer light on the carpet of berries, stillness except for the buzz of the occasional bee… to heck with it, I said.  Sometimes you just have to carry on with what you’re doing in the moment you’re doing it.

As we got going again I did take the opportunity to teach my wife a word she’d never heard before.  That’s rare, because her English is very good.

Serendipity: the happy accident that happens when you find something good you weren’t even looking for.

Picking blackberries in the big city

About five minutes from our place a squad of bulldozers and front-end loaders flattened a whole city block alongside the commuter rail line, leaving a huge pile of bricks at one end and an ugly wasteland on the rest.

Not so unusual, except that there was nothing there in the first place except a vacant lot covered in thick patches of blackberry bush.  Every summer until this one we’d head over every two or three days or so dressed in old shoes and paint-stained jeans, heading home again with scratches on our arms and another load of what my mother used to call wild Himalayan blackberries.   I’ve been picking them since I was old enough to pick up a pail.

There was also a great spot we used to have close to where I work, but last year they ruined half of it by making a park out of one side and putting up a two-metre-high fence around the rest, making it nearly impossible to get to the berries except in the evenings or on weekends, because you now to go through a schoolyard to get to them.

Now that our best places to pick have been obliterated, we’ve been forced to look elsewhere.  It took a few spins on the bike, but I found a patch by a railway bridge and along a lane.

It’s not that Germans don’t know what blackberries are, because I do see people out picking from time to time, but this one patch, so full of berries, was left mostly untouched because it sits on a steep hill and most of the best were well out of reach.

So the other day I set to work getting to those rich, fat, black pieces of fruit that had been hanging there for days just waiting for someone like me to come along with a six-foot stepladder and a determination to make some blackberry pie.

I must have been quite a sight surfing atop the ladder along the upper brambles, because some Turkish kids came by and started throwing sticks at me.  When I turned around to glare at them they scampered away.

When I left the ladder unattended for a couple of minutes at the bottom of the patch a couple of kids from the kindergarten across the street scampered over to grab it for themselves, but a teacher gave them hell for pawing after stuff not their own.

Later on a Turkish lady dressed in that grey, bell-shaped garb you often see floating along the streets stopped and, in the best German she could muster, gave me pointers on where to find the best ones and cautioning that I really should take care not to fall off my perch lest I end up in the thorns.

I’m not used to picking berries in public at all, and avoid being on a stage of any kind if I can help it, but with so little choice left in the area, I’m going to have to get used to it if I want any more before the short season is over.

The results are the same in any case: fresh-baked pie that doesn’t last long.

The berries and why I pick them

Back in the thick of summer a colleague at work looked at my bare forearms and asked, “Did you guys get a cat?”

“No,” I answered, inspecting the tiny red scratches, “just been berry-picking.”

The blackberries were beautiful this summer.  They started to ripen during a long heat wave while I was away at some shin-dig late June in Toronto, a hot, sticky blanket that lingered over the north of Germany for another couple of weeks after I got back until the third week of July.  Riding by my usual patches I’d always stop to inspect the crop, checking to make sure the bright green buds were on their way to red.  Then, as the red ones at the apex of each bunch started to blacken, I knew my free time for the next couple of weeks would be filled with picking, baking pies and making jam.

I have three main patches to pick in rotation.  One is a five-minute bike ride from the office, so after work I’d ride my bike into the thickest part, change into my old clothes and start filling the empty containers.

My main patch is a five-minute walk from home on a huge empty lot near the commuter rail line.  A third is a little further out of the way and much smaller, but worth it because the bushes are up against a building that catches and intensifies the heat of the sun, making the berries especially sweet if you wait long enough before picking them.  For the main patch near our place I’d carry a stepladder to throw over the bushes and gain access to the juiciest ones at the top that, without aid, always remain just too far out of reach.

Since I’ve been old enough to pick up a pail I’ve been heading off to pick blackberries, bringing them home so my mother could cook them up.    To be able to carry on so many years later something that started behind our house in a little mountainside Pacific coast village in Canada gives me a connection not only to my earliest past, but with the place it all started.

I also like the calming, meditative effect of being focused on one task.  In this age of continuous partial attention and constant interruption, having a couple of hours to concentrate on something as simple and timeless as gathering food for your family is quite rare.   I took the little red-haired girl along one morning and noticed that after the first few minutes of chatting and joking about little things, she too became relaxed and quiet as we worked our way along.

In bringing her along I also think I’m showing her how important it is to seize the day, to do things when it’s time to do them, because if there’s one thing that won’t wait for the next day, it’s berries.

There is also a great satisfaction in serving up a warm blackberry pie for dessert while a stack of jam jars cools on the counter, knowing that when you go to open one the following January you’ll be able to enjoy something that truly is the fruit of your own labours, and which costs nothing but the time you spend on it.  I go to markets and see trays of perfect berries selling for €8 a half-kilo and give a little inward smile.   Of course it’s easier to just buy them, but the pain of a few thorns and scratches that go away in a few days are worth it to get a lot more than just the berries.

Weekend massacre leaves thousands of wasps dead, cherry trees plundered

Thousands of wasps were too stupid to find the exit over the weekend, dying a horrible death by drowning in a trap filled with a mixture of warm water and honey. The wasps entered the trap carefully placed over the entrance to a nest they had built in the garden of Oma’s place out in farming country near Osnabrück, Germany.

“It was a wasp massacre,” said police spokesman Igott Heimweh, “but just looking at them, you just have to shake your head, cuz damn, they’re dumb.  I mean, they flew into the hole at the bottom, OK?  But then they didn’t turn around and fly out.  And once they hit that water, game over. They just flailed around a bit, then drowned.”

The bodies started to pile up almost immediately after the bell-shaped jar filled with sweet, alluring liquid was placed over the nest.  By next morning it was so full of dead or dying insects, it had to be emptied.

“‘Absolutely disgusting,’” one child with red hair was overheard to say as the dead insects were poured out.  “Iggit-iggit.”

The jar is a clever way to kill wasps without using the traditional Canadian methods of bombarding them with chemical insecticide sprays or smashing the nest open with a hockey stick to stomp on the enraged insects with lumberjack boots.

In a related weekend incident, a marauding band of cycling summertime fruitarians plundered Oma’s two nearby cherry trees.  The mostly immobile nonagenarian could merely sit back and watch as the intruders placed an extendable ladder to their upper reaches to gain access to the ripest fruit clustered on the heavily laden branches.

After stuffing as many of the dark, juicy orbs into their mouths as they could in a 48-hour period, the bandits filled their packs and set off on the train again north for an evening of cooking them up with a mixture of sugar and pectin.  Ten jars of the darkest, richest, most delicious cherry jam you will never, ever find on German store shelves are now safely stored in the basement of an undisclosed Hamburg location, to be consumed sometime over the next few months.

Some are reading

Summer reading. 

Why are summer holidays the best time to have a stack of books to read?  You’d think winter would be the season for it.  Rainy, cold, windy, dreary….  

No wait.  That’s Germany this summer.

Good thing I’m well-stocked for holidays starting in only three days.  Probably too much to attack in just under four weeks, but I’ll give it a shot.  Besides, some of them aren’t meant to be read from beginning to end.

The first one I’ll mention is Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American.  After falling in love a few weeks ago with Ms. Hustvedt after reading What I Loved, her latest was something of a post-honeymoon let-down.  I guess I came to expect a book with the same depth of insight into troubling psychological themes and instead found myself getting bogged down midst a dandelion salad of intertwining relationships spanning three generations, several families and storylines.  Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention enough.

A lot in that stack I’ve read before.  Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island I’ve been through twice already, but always find a laugh from him.  Shakespeare was bought on the strength of the author’s name – we’ll see how that turns out – and as for Mother Tongue: read it!  It’s full of a-hah! No shit? moments about the language you use every day and never really thought about before.

I’m probably the last person in the Western Hemisphere to read anything by Richard Dawkins, so it’s about time.  Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go I bought for the same reason as the Bryson: my wife and I love the film The Remains of the Day and so we’ve high hopes for this one.

George Carlin’s Braindroppings and Napalm and Silly Putty, mentioned back when the great man brayed his last, is for those spots inbetween when there’s just no time to get deep into a story.  Monologues, one-liners, quips, probes, thrusts, screeds, japes, taunts, insults, musings, harangues, verbal ordeals, jokes, notions, doubts, opinions, questions, thoughts, beliefs, assertions, assumptions, disturbing references, comedy, nonsense, satire, mockery, merriment, sarcasm, ridicule, silliness, bluster, toxic alienation, joy, anger, wonder, confusion, wisdom, hostility, innocence, impudence, reflection and semantic distortion*** suitable for about 10 minutes before the book falls to the floor with a soft plop to begin a mid-afternoon sacking out in a cot somewhere, or maybe just a trip to the john.

Sarah’s Key and Missing Mom are a nod to my wife’s taste, but despite their obvious girly exterior, I always trust her judgment.  Did I ever mention that I think she’s the wisest woman I’ve ever known?

And last but not least: a recommendation to read Planet Germany by Cathy Dobson, a well-written and funny account of a year in the life of a British expat family’s attempt to fit in once and for all with their German neighbours and surroundings.   I liked it because it was both personal and refreshingly free of most of the worn-out stereotypes you hear all too often about Germans and their country.  Self-published doesn’t get much better.  You can order it by Amazon like all the books here, or just get ahold of her via her blog.  Tell her I sent you.

***Full disclosure: shamelessly copied from both covers.