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It’s dewberry season in Texas. Some practical advice and poetic reflections on red wasps, slippery slopes, and the exuberance of foraging in a time of peril and suffering.
Marisol Cortez
I had wanted Zarzamora to be his middle name, Wolfgang Zarzamora, but his papa worried the name would be too strong, too weird, hold too much power.
But yes: I did want to name the baby, in part at least, after the perennial blackberry native to Tejas that names the famous Westside street.
Following my footsteps, my exhortations to stay where it’s flat, don’t slip, Wolfgang Isidro behind me repeats what I first told him, one time aloud to himself and another for his dad: There’s more ripe ones than you think! You just don’t see them at first because they’re the color of the earth. You gotta crouch down low, pay attention, then you’ll start to see them all around you.
As I pick my way up and down the slippery rocks, as I fold my body into the spaces between shrubbery limbs to pick the ripest berries suddenly surfacing to view against the dark wet of hillside earth, I couldn’t help but think of families in tents, reports of doctors dying in detention, patients dumped into mass graves, universities bombed, professors police-beaten trying to protect their students, children holding signs thanking students like my own half a world away: thank you Columbia, thank you UCLA.
I thought: how can that world be true, and this one too, all at once—this undeserved abundance here on the horizon of killing summer.
I couldn’t help but genuflect, hands moving over bramble as I gathered:
Thank you for allowing me to be alive today. Thank you for allowing me to visit this land, this planet. Thank you, my body, for continuing to carry me without pain. Thank you for the abundance of this fruit that has faithfully appeared and reappeared for over twenty years now, twenty centuries, twenty millennia, more than any one of us could ever pick, despite all we’ve done to you, against you. Thank you to the species of rubus that knows how to specialize in disturbed landscapes, fragmented habitat, dammed rivers, sandy soils, sunny wastelands. In return for this gift of your returning each year, I vow I will do what I can to protect all life. I vow I will do what I can to help.
Then a single red wasp appeared in the brush to gnaw at wood, to warn me this was still another’s home. Remembering its powerful sting above my eyebrow one spring, I backed myself out the way I came in as the rain picked up, falling softly in sheets, a susurrus across lake’s surface.
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