Where I went to pick blackberries this morning, in the world by the stone wall, fat Concord grapes are ripening. Soon the stone wall will smell like wine. I'll have to go back and pick them.

Earlier in the year, red raspberries and black ones were here. It's a paradise of wild fruits.



"You can come here'n pick, so long as you don't ever cultivate. You can't pull one weed or prune one branch of nothing."

An old guy, arms sinewy and brown as the thickest stems of grapevine. Some long loose shirt-thing tied up with a braided cord of some fiber or other. Bare legs with knobby knees, and bare feet whose soles must have been impervious to thorns. Dandelion-seed hair and deep, dark eyes.

He leaned on a walking stick, I thought, but when I looked closely I saw that it was much too straight for that, black as a fire-charred branch, and with an edge to it.

"Ehhh, don't mind about this," he said, waving it round and slicing leaves from the walnut saplings and sumac pushing up through the blackberries. "I don't use it no more. Folks don't come by much, so there ain't no need, and my arm's too stiff for much whacking. I just use it for knocking down high fruits. Go on back and take a look around. There's other stuff back there. Feral apples (most sour as sin, but some are sweet), pears . . .

"Anything I shouldn't touch?" I asked with a grin.

"I already gave you the rules, didn't I? Touch whatever you please. Go deep enough in, you'll find a big old lightning-struck tree, musta been a seedling round Prohibition era, been half dead for a number of years now, more of a prop for bittersweet and poison ivy than anything else. Maybe you might want to avoid that, unless you like itching. Then again, the crown came down in that storm last October, and I did observe some fine oyster mushrooms growing along it, and the bees been swarming round it, so maybe there's honeycomb in there somewhere--but then again, maybe those were wasps. I wasn't looking too closely."

I stuck with blackberries, but I picked a big grape leaf, too. I used it as a plate for the blackberries:



(The tomatoes are from the garden, not from the world by the stone wall)

Jiji showed an interest in the plate (blurry--sorry!):