august 12th
i feel like in the summer you are yourself more than ever. during the year there is work weighing you down, a schedule restricting what you want to be doing, and stress coming at you from every direction, but in the summer there is none of that, and you can do what you want to do how you want to do it, and for the most part, nobody is stopping you. i love to bake. this spring one day when i was bored i went back and read one of my old diaries, and it said something like “today i made 3 batches of cookies, it was so much fun, i love the feeling of making something out of nothing” and i just thought, yeah, ok, cool charlotte, you can make cookies. but today i got a flash back to that same feeling. this morning i got a call from my neighbors house saying that they had hundreds of ripe blackberries ready for picking. so, i headed over with my small berry basket to pick some, when i go there i knew the first moment that i was going to need a bigger basket. the bushes that lined up against the fence were covered with berries. three rows that were lined up close to one another just speckled with bunches of the deep blue berries. when i got there i was eager to try one, so i picked a near one off the branch and it basically melted in my mouth like candy. its not often that you find a good blackberry. they’re always either too sour or ripe and bland. these, were perfect.
we picked for no longer than thirty minutes, and by the end i found myself literally in the middle of the bushes, under branches sitting on the ground and picking the berries that no one else could see. once my second basket was literally overflowing i crawled out from the bushes, managing to get blueberry juice on every single of my articles of clothing.
later in the afternoon, i took my blackberries, what was left after every member of my extended family and house guests had thoroughly ”sampled” them, and started to make a pie. i added the cinnamon, flour, sugar, corn starch and let it all soak in, meanwhile preparing my crust. after it was settled i poured the berries into the crust and lay the lattice gently on top. it took 35 minutes plus some to bake in the oven and upon the beeping of the timer, for the second or third time, it came out with the crust golden brown and the berries softened and faded into a beautiful pinkish purple.
