First Blackberries

A harvest of ticks of course, but enough first blackberries to have some on plain yogurt. I want to make a caramelized onion and blackberry puree jam/sauce to use on a pork tenderloin. It would be seriously wonderful. I have to strip down after picking berries, to shake out my clothes and check for ticks. Glad I hiked down to the mailbox, as a book from the Utah Kid that I had been wanting to read, and a twenty dollar bill. How nice is that? On the way back up there was a large rattlesnake, stretched almost completely across the driveway. My place is in their slither pattern, they pass through here, following water. I jump up and down a few times, and bang the ground with my broom handle. They really do hate vibration, and he slithered down into the hollow. The crows were waiting, when I got back to the house, squawking for their micro-waved frozen mice. Next thing you know, I'll be teaching their children to fly. Nanny to the crows. I was thinking about the concept of 'perfectly centered' knowing how impossible it actually was, even the grit in plaster would throw you off a millimeter, where a nail, for instance, might set; grain, the exact angle of the blow; all those sub-ordinate clauses, and not be exactly where you imagined. If you're driving a thousand nails, or setting a thousand screws, 'perfect' and 'exact' become somewhat relative. Things adhere to a pattern without making too fine a point. The fox, for instance, makes her rounds, Gardy Loo throws her slops. First problem is that sense of time. I lived for a while on the Navaho Reservation, and I was convinced, after six months, that the units of time I was used to, minutes and hours, were not a universal given. Second, who cares? and I don't mean that perniciously, or any other way, but setting dates for the completion of something is always fairly well compromised. Constraints imposed by the venue, by the dates people were available, by the weather; so to say that an opera will open at a particular time on a particular date is mostly a product of the advance publicity. We're mostly ready after the fact. Human nature. You only realize what you should have said hours later, taking a hot bath in a hotel room and scrubbing off the fog.