Dewberry Season

The taste of dewberries takes me back to childhood every time.

I was walking down the country road by our house over the weekend and was surprised to see a few ripe dewberries here and there – the first ones of the season.

I ate the ripe ones as I walked. I’ve never felt the need to wash a dewberry before eating it. Blowing on it satisfies me that I have removed enough dust and the occasional small bug from the berry to safely eat it.

The next day I took our three boys with me and we found more.

There’s not enough to need a bucket yet, but the time’s coming.

From the looks of things it’s going to be a great year for dewberries – but I’ve known that for a while. The white flowers of the plants hinted as such last month.

Late April and early May were always dewberry picking time for me as a kid.

My parents’ cattle and goats of recent years have cleared out of the best dewberry areas of my youth, but the vines around our house used to be so prolific my younger brother and sister and I would head out to the field and fencelines armed with buckets most afternoons after school and pick a gallon or so per day.

My mom would reward our efforts by taking those dewberries and making the most wonderful dewberry pies.

People have different opinions about dewberry pies, but I think most people overdo the filling at the expense of overshadowing the dewberries.

But not my mom.

The custard filling in her dewberry pies was minimal, allowing the dewberries to be the stars of the pie – as it should be.

The extra berries we’d eat with whipped cream (another great way to enjoy them, if you have not done so I highly recommend) or we’d freeze them.

There was nothing like grabbing a handful of frozen dewberries to suck on in the middle of summer.

Picking dewberries was always an adventure. Every once in a while we’d see a snake or better yet, a box turtle.

Sometimes those turtles would have mouths as purple as us – they liked the dewberries as much as we did.

As a kid I’d usually take those turtles home for a day or two as pets before releasing them back in the wild.

One spring of my childhood, my mom announced to us that we were going to pick and sell dewberries to go toward our “vacation fund.”

We didn’t take a ton of trips when I was a kid (Astros games and day trips to the caves of Central Texas being notable exceptions) but every summer we’d go and stay a few days at the beach in Galveston.

The money in the “vacation fund” was what we used to do fun stuff while we were at the beach – ice cream on the sea wall, souveniers at Murdoch’s, taffy at the candy store on the Strand.

Usually that vacation fund was only fueled by the selling of aluminum cans we’d pick up on the county roads.

Anyway, the prospect of selling dewberries was a whole new venture almost too exciting for us to fully comprehend.

That one spring we picked dewberries like never before.

I’m sure our hands were all scratched up and dyed purple for weeks.

We picked so many our mom even took out ads in The Fayette County Record and on the radio’s Trading Post on KVLG.

And what a summer we had that year, as we lived it up on the beach, our good times paid for by the dewberries we had picked.