blackberry Pie, vignette

A short vignette on childhood in North Carolina

I begin my story almost as far back as my memories take me. Back to a big lush green sodded back yard lit up by fire flies and the dying light of an east coast sunset. I plucked little deep purple plump blackberries from the bushes that lined our house and ran to place them in the big silver aluminum bowl my father held, its still in their house today. Down on one knee as he kicked beside me in his tight denim jeans and tucked in button down, most compared him to a young Robert Redford. Once the bowl was all filled up and glistening and the last pink orange rays of light  were bouncing off the deep purple that filled up to the rim of the bowl my dad asked in his sweetest voice with boyish excitement “Do you want to carry it?”

I shook my head my little auburn bangs shaking in my face as I nodded my head, giggling and wrapping my tiny arms around the heavy bowl 

“wait wait!” My dad said as I turned to briskly walk away I turned back wide brown eyes staring at his grey eyes sparkling with delight as he placed two tiny daisies on the top of our blackberry pile. “Ok” he says proudly and then in a soft laughing way the truly loving fathers have he asked rhetorically “You got it?” I’m sure I swayed clumsily up the beautiful dark wood porch that wrapped around the back of our house to the perfect figure in the warmly lit doorway. “Oh!” She exclaimed “Is that for me?” She asked in this false high pitched tone, like she was forcing herself to say they things someone the likes of Joan Cleaver would say. She cackled as if it was practiced. “Oh lily she said, that’s so sweet thank you” but there was no weight, no hug just a big cartoonish smooch she planted on my dad before breaking the moment in her usual dictating tone “ ok ok let’s get inside before the bugs get in” I don’t remember the rest, or where my brother was. I imagine my dad made blackberry pie, he always made the most beautiful blackberry pie, and soufflés, and lemon meringue pie and creams Brûlée all with the same precision my grandmother had taught him, measuring salt in his hand and eyeing the sugar he dumped into the mixer. The same precision she tried to teach me but I was impatient always more eager to lick the bowl than watch the ingredients mix together in it. I remember being crammed into the tiny kitchen of the tiny brick house in Rocks borough where she lived with my great aunt after my grandfather died, and she mixed coconut cakes and ginger bread cookies and I liked ever bowl.