#62: Staycation (II) - Wild Blackberries

How do I stop the big city from making my kids too hard? By going fruit picking.

I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly Brussels Notes newsletter - for the next four weeks, while I try not to go insane from spending my holidays in Brussels - I’ll be writing about different aspects of my summer staycation in the Belgian capital. Boeiend, as (some of) the locals might say (if you’re not already a part of the community, you can subscribe here).

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I worry about my kids. About the usual mundane stuff that parents worry about their children, but also other things. I worry about what growing up in Brussels will do to them, when and how much of their innocence it will take from them. That their childhood summertime memories will be steeped in concrete grey and hot asphalt black, exhuast fumes and kebab stands, rather than the nettle greens and sunset oranges of my own early years. I didn’t exactly have a bucolic upbringing, growing up in suburban Ireland, but living in a dead end estate where our small town petered out into a haphazard mix of farmland and abandoned building sites, we had proximity to nature, and we could play at being country kids whenever we wanted - running through fields, climbing trees, and picking blackberries in the summer from the hedge that demarcated town from country.

It was a sheltered soft kind of an upbringing, and we were - I was - soft. Too soft to survive in a big city like Brussels I sometimes think. I don’t worry that my kids will be soft; They were born into this chaos, better equipped to navigate Brussels than I ever will be. I do worry though that they might be too hard, that they’re going to miss out on the possibility of connecting with nature, even if only in the same casual and superficial way I did when I was younger. I worry they won’t know the fun of grass-stained knees and nettle stings and dock leaves and the metallic bite of the electric fence and fingers stained red with just-plucked fruit. Their childhood soundtrack is ambulances and exhaust mufflers, not lowing cattle in a next door field. It’s why we send them to the local educational farm every summer for a couple of weeks  and why I delight almost as much as they do in the stories about the animals they’ve fed, the food they’ve made, and the knowledge they’ve absorbed from the farmers that comes out at unexpected times in the days afterwards. And it’s why I could hardly say no when we spotted a rogue blackberry bush growing next to our bus stop and they demanded we go and pick it.

I don’t know why I was surprised to see blackberries growing wild in Brussels, they’re a hardy plant. But there they were, behind a bus shelter for the number 87 on a patch of scrubland that passes for a parklet. Big spiky bushes growing all the way along the end wall of a row of terraced houses, partially obscuring some (state-sanctioned?) graffiti. In their usual way the children pleaded with me to stop for some berries, but in my usual way I countered that it was late, everyone was tired and hungry, and in any case we didn't have anything to put them in. I also knew that the following day I would have to fill in some afternoon cranky time between them coming home from summer camp and dinner being ready. In any case, I had some cranky time I knew I’d have to fill the following day between arriving home from their summer camp and dinner being ready. Time perfectly suited to a little family outing.

So back we went the next day, plastic tub in hand and charged with the easy delight of picking some fruit. I set them to cruising the bush in search of the ripest, darkest berries they could find, and they whooped and squealed whenever they found a particularly juicy bunch, yelling for me to come and help if they were intimidated by the protective thorns or if their bounty was too high up for them to reach. Whatever internecine playground trifles they’d brought home with them melted away with every plucked berry. 

When I was a kid we’d eat the berries straight off the bush for the instant gratification of their tart sweetness, skipping home afterwards with shins prickling from the kiss of nettle stings and our faces and hands stained ruby red. But grown-up me is less spontaneous, and I directed them to throw everything they could pluck into the white plastic Ikea tub we’d taken with us so we could eat them another time and thus prolong the pleasure beyond this immediate hit. I also told them we’d need to wash them, to clean the berries of whatever accumulated urban grime they’d have picked up growing next to a busy bus stop.

They didn’t fight me on this, and once our tub was full and the lid snapped back onto it we walked the short distance back to the apartment. Into the fridge they went, and the talk turned to what we would do with them. Pack them in tomorrow’s lunch, while they’re still fresh, was one idea. Boil them up for a coulis and some vanilla ice cream was another. They did make it to someone’s lunch box but they came back half eaten and mushy from a day’s turbulence knocking around a backpack and trailing with them complaints about their sourness. The rest of them are still in the fridge now, a week later. 

We never did get around to making that coulis together. The fruit had been plucked, after all, that was the point, not whatever came after that. Anything else was its own discrete activity needing its own arguments. And while they revel in exploring what outdoor wilderness Brussels has to give, I’ve not yet managed to seduce them into cooking with me in our small makeshift kitchen. Attention moved on to other pursuits. It always does, there are just too many distractions in the big city. Maybe I should send them to culinary camp next summer. That’ll soften them up.