~~~
The boys flutter from bush to bush like butterflies, picking
one or two berries before moving on.
Once they got to the other side of a big patch, Edmund started calling
out “Can you come find us Aunt Chava?
Come find me Aunt Ellie!” Ellie
and I, intent on our picking, turned them down.
Edmund asked why, and Ellie told him that we were concentrating on our
picking, since that is the right way to do it.
Both Edmund and Nathaniel then went silent, a rather unusual
thing, and Ellie and I chatted for a while before I really noticed the odd
silence.
“Boys, are you staying close?”
“Yes, Aunt Chava. We
are concentrating on eating our berries, since that is the right way to do it!”
was the smart reply from Edmund.
Nathaniel immediately corrected him, telling Edmund that he
wasn’t eating his, he was saving them for a “yummy pie”.
~~~
The first time we went out, we also had Jeremiah and Elaine
with us. Elaine, poor girl, is about as
tall as the grass that surrounds the blackberry patches, so she would
practically swim through the pasture to reach a bush. Once there, anytime she reached for a berry,
she’d find a thorn first, and her hurt and offended “Ow!” was frequently
heard. I commented to Ellie that Elaine
was master of the perfect “ow”.
Throughout last night’s picking, any time anyone said ow,
Edmund would pipe up, “Was that the
perfect ow Chava? [or Ellie, as the case may be]”. At first we just laughed and said no, but as
the picking advanced, we finally explained to him what would qualify as the
perfect ow. He then tried it out several
times, so we then explained that the element of true surprise was an integral
part of the perfect ow’s makeup.
Very soon after this, Ellie grunted, and then said that she
would have just made the perfect ow, but she swallowed it instead. Nathaniel asked what that meant, and I did my
best to explain it. I love explaining
things like this to children. I told him
that it is when you are just about to say something, but you choose not to, and
so you swallow it, and it goes back to where your words came from (hey, I can’t
be perfectly literal when I explain things, how fun would that be?). He thought that sounded amusing, so he
decided to swallow his next ow, next time he got pricked by a thorn. Since I didn’t hear him say ow for the rest
of the evening, I’m guessing he learned how to swallow his words.
~~~
As the evening progressed, Ellie and I decided to switch
places with the boys, and have them look for us around the blackberry
bushes. So I told the boys that Ellie
had disappeared, they went to find her, stayed with her for a while, then she
returned the favor, with a few additions.
“Your Aunt Chava has disappeared! I bet she went over to the car to drive away
without us, you should go find her!”
Edmund and Nathaniel starting talking and making their way
to the car to catch me, when Ellie interrupted.
“I’m joking boys.
She’s somewhere in the patch. She
wouldn’t drive off without you. She
isn’t like me, she’s nice.”
“So what are you Aunt Ellie?”
“I’m mean.”
“No you’re not mean, you’re thin.” (Actual quote from Nathaniel, I kid you not.)
“What?”
“You’re not mean, you’re nice.” (Smart guy, reword your
answer when someone didn’t hear you the first time, makes it easier to
understand)
Soon after that we headed back to the car, while discussing
a skunk that I had seen earlier in the night.
~~~
Speaking of the skunk, the boys started talking aobut what
skunks eat, and then went on to what other animals eat similar things. When they got to giraffe Edmund gave us the
amazing news that giraffes can eat leaves, branches, and thorns.
This was a lovely idea to Nathaniel. “I wish I was a giraffe so that when I am
picking blackberries, and a thorn gets in my way I can chew it up!”
Edmund, always very particular responded with, “You want to
have a giraffe head but a human body?”
“No, I just want to be a giraffe!”
“With hands?”
“No, just a regular giraffe!”
“But you said you wished you
were a giraffe so that when you were picking, PICKING, blackberries, you could chew up the thorns.”
Long ago in this
conversation Ellie and I were laughing uproariously. Edmund sounded every bit like an attorney
cross examining a witness.
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