Summers with my grandparents meant swimming at the local pool and getting in trouble for running through Grandpa’s garden. He always smelled the tomatoes on us the moment we walked through the door. He loved gardening and all of us enjoyed the benefits of it. Grandma always served fresh sliced tomatoes, green beans, and my favorite- homemade blackberry jam.
Grandpa tended his blackberry patch throughout the summer, and we were lucky if we were visiting when it was time to pick them. Grandma would send us out with a dish and we would walk to the small patch. We wrestled through the tangle of scratchy stems and picked the plumpest berries. We seemed to always come back to the house with purple tainted hands and mouths. Grandma would work her magic and jars of dark jam would line her table. Family and friends who sat around their table, which was always a happy place, would eat the jam from Grandpa’s garden smothered on fresh rolls or over buttered toast in the mornings.
Grandpa was an American hero. He flew fighter planes in World War II and wrote love letters home to my Grandma. She still has a box of his letters addressed to his “little wife” and a few times she let my sisters and I dig through and read them. After the war, he raised a wonderful family, was a firefighter, and gave back to the community through his work at church and through the boy scouts.
He died some years ago, but I’m reminded of him often. A few years ago, my dad gave me cuttings from Grandpa’s blackberry bushes. They were tiny little things, but get bigger and healthier every year. This summer we will have berries. I’ll take my own little girls out to the patch, give them dishes to fill, and tell them stories of their great grandpa as we eat berries from his bushes. Someday I hope the taste of blackberries will remind them of the hero who fought for his country, loved his community, and tended his family and garden with love.
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| One of our cuttings almost ready to blossom |
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