Summer’s End

9/5/11 After the blistering days of July and August, today’s 70ish temps are not only welcome but hopefully glimmers of fall temps to come. As Labor Day is the unofficial last day of summer, I’ve decided to celebrate with the childhood memory of blackberry cobbler and hand-cranked ice cream. Mother would use the last of the summer wild blackberries picked by us from thickets, along roadsides ----literally a “sticky” endeavor. If you’ve never picked, you haven’t experienced the joy of the stick from those thorny barbs which grow alongside those sweet berries. It makes the flavor of the cobbler all the sweeter. As S. Sifton states, “The taste is summer condensed and intensified.” (NYTimes, D7, 8/31/11)

Of course, we added homemade ice cream atop our steamy bowls of cobbler. It, too, was all the better for the cream was a family “labor.” From the going to Ellis ice plant, just a few streets east of the train depot, in the Alstheler and Payne Livestock truck (that wasn’t really a truck) to pick up our block of ice, brought out to the platform by a guy wielding those big tongs, to the chipping, with the wooden handle ice pick, of the ice for the ice-cream freezer (and a little for Mother’s iced tea, which the was best, especially with all those chips and slivers of ice) to the sitting on the steps of the latticed back porch awaiting our turn to crank, (Somehow the adults made is seem a privilege to “crank.”) it was an all day affair. But what a sweet, mouth-watering memory of a childhood Labor Day as the Adams family said good-by to summer at 2211.

To everything there is a season, 
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:… a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2)