When I was a kid, elementary-school-aged, I was allowed to bike around with my friends as long as the sun was up. We would play in this vacant lot that was supposed to be for housing developments. It’d never been finished. The developer had laid down a few foundations, then stopped.

Every year the lot was more overgrown. A patch of scraggly-tree woods and brambles at the edge of it separated the lot from the apartment complex on the other side; the wildness encroached further onto the lea each summer.

And almost every day of those summers, we cut through. My brother and our friends and I scrambled and explored our way over the grass-covered dirt mounds, plucking wildflowers and Queen Anne’s lace that snaked up through the concrete blocks. The field, like the school-free days, seemed, to stretch out infinitely—an unwound, impossible time, its passage kept only by the sun’s slow arc overhead.

And every July, there were blackberries.

They were our secret blackberries. They belonged to nobody, and we told no adults about them. After all, what if they told us not to eat them? Or to go home?

The blackberries’ first green buds poked through just around the time school let out for the year. The first fruits ripened in exuberant, anticipatory bursts in June: initial rumblings that gave way to an avalanche of purple-staining fruit by July.

There was nothing more delicious than a secret, then.

Of course, summers are not infinite. Eventually, the blackberries got overripe, eaten by squirrels, trampled on the ground. Fewer and fewer grew back. Then none. The shrub leaves turned blood orange, dried and crinkled at the edges.

I’m not often nostalgic. By and large, adulthood is better than childhood.

But I’m not sure anything in my adult life strikes me as utterly extraordinary as those secret blackberries did when I was ten.

___

I want to help you rediscover the blackberries in your life. There is something extraordinary, something secret and fleeting within you.

It’s worth remembering.

Let’s find it together.