And the answer is: blackberry pie. I liked
Carol's anwer the best for originality, and Joan's for common sense — although, strictly speaking, the picking was the hard part; once separated from the bush the blackberries had no problem with being eaten.
______________________________________________________I hadn't been blackberrying in a couple of years, and the place (no, I'm not telling you where) is considerably more overgrown now, one of the thicker thickets I've fought my way through. The blackberry canes have grown over each other and the surrounding underbrush, sometimes forming very effective barbed-wire fencing around the berries, and occasionally up into trees, where the fruit is most unfairly too high for me to reach. I tell myself those belong to the birds, which was obviously the intention: if you're a plant seeking world dominion, make your fruit juicy, tasty and hard for flightless critters to reach, and your seeds will go far, just a few at a time. To paraphrase the old saying, a bird is just a plant's way of getting another plant.
______________________________________________________People say "dense thicket," but no one ever says "thick thicket," understandably, I suppose. I actually looked up
thicket earlier to see if it was from
thick or another case of convergent semantics, but it is indeed etymologically more or less "thick place." Which the blackberry patch certainly is.
______________________________________________________Only my husband would refer to the second baseman of a certain evil baseball team as Robinson "Arma Virumque" Cano.
______________________________________________________This does not seem to be the Red Sox' year. It got to the point a few weeks ago where Grant said, "Varitek broke his foot," and I said, "you're just making that up." What would be next? Hail? Lightning? Plagues of locusts? Very nearly as bad: plagues of Rays and Rangers, and a tragedy of errors. I am not complaining (much), as I was certain six years ago that the Sox would never win a Series in my lifetime, they've won two since then, and it's probably someone else's turn. As long as it's not
Voldemort's minions the Evil Em the Yankees.
______________________________________________________
We went down to Connecticut yesterday to visit Miss B at camp. I took the obligatory water picture — see, it's blue — and I refrained with difficulty from leaping the rope barrier and flinging myself into the coolth. Heaven only knows how much trouble I would have been in, but since there are signs all over the place saying "set a good example," such behavior would undoubtedly have been frowned upon.
______________________________________________________
Speaking of blue, I am at least nominally participating in the Tour de Fleece, and I have actually been spinning. Do you know anyone else who takes two years to spin a four-ounce braid of merino roving? I thought not. Still, progress has been made. I may not seize the coveted yellow jersey, but I'll climb as high as I can.
______________________________________________________Finally, Conan (the Grammarian) would like to advise the copy-editing staff of the
New York Times, assuming that there still is one, that no English possessive pronoun ever contains an apostrophe. When he interrupts my peaceful perusal of the Sunday magazine with screams of anguish, things have gone too far.
