It was about 8:00 am when Roger and I went to Ma and asked if we could have blackberry cobbler for lunch.  She said "Sure" and handed each of us a small shiny 2 quart bucket.  "Don't bring any red or green berries back with you."  Off we went.  We didn't have far to go for berries, nearly every fence line in Weir, KS has blackberry bushes.  We started picking only the blackest (and sometimes the softest) berries we could find.  Some were as big as grapes...the ones we tried to specialize in finding.  The biggest problem with blackberries is that the larger ones are more toward the center of the bushes and it would leave us scratched and have thorns we would have to pull out if we got too aggressive in our pickings.

There were also a couple of crab-apple trees and several wild cherry trees and a couple of peach trees around.  We would have to sample those also.  We would even stop at the honeysuckle vines and have a bit of necture with the occassional bee to shoo away.  Took lots of pulling the stems out of the blooms for the small drop of necture you would capture, but when you're 7 and 9 years old, time goes by real slowly and you don't notice how long you get side tracked on the other things to do during the blackberry hunt.

We would go back to berry picking again and again between other side trips with other fruits.  We would also find a shady spot to sit down and rest a bit from our hard labors.  While we sat, we would frequently sample the berries.  After a couple of hours on our quest, we noticed the buckets were only about 1/4 full.  Back to the bushes we would go.  In a little bit the buckets would approach 1/2 full.  In the hot June sun, we would have to find a shady spot again and rest a bit......again with some sampling.  After the rest back to picking.  Again the buckets would be half full.  We figured it might be getting close to lunch time and we would need to get the berries back to Ma.  We started letting down our quality checks on the berries some and a few half red-half black berries would creep into the buckets, then some mostly red with a little black, and finally some red and even one or 2 that were green would get in.

Back to the house we would go.  Ma would look into the buckets and shake her head, but not say anything.  She then sent us out to wash our hands and faces, that had lots of evidence that we had been sampling the wares.  She would then remove the green and red berries and between the two buckets there was enough black ones to make the cobbler.  Even with all the sampling of various fruits, we still had room for the cobbler after lunch.  The other bi-product of the berry hunts were chiggers and ticks, but that can wait for another day to discuss.