A New Suit

It was a bright and sunny day out while I was walking near a creek in town.  It’s been cold here for longer than we expected in this part of the country, and once the worst of the coldness dissipated we were left with clouds and rain.  But today was different and for at least a few good minutes I made use of it.  I didn’t stop to smell the flowers or anything like that, but I did notice how green the grass was, how many squirrels were out as well as the bushes and vines growing on their trellises.

This evoked a fond childhood memory of the blackberry bush in the front yard.  I love blackberries, if not for the amazing sweet yet tart taste that works so well in jams, pies, yogurt and by themselves, then for the nostalgia of it.  It did not evoke any memories of falling into that stupid bush when I was reaching too far in to pick that last handful, or the black widow I discovered living in the thing when I crawled under it and sent me screaming to my mother.  No, this warm sunny day only brought back berries and basking.
 
Then the cynical switch flipped in my bipolar brain and I wondered what would happen if the city planted blackberry bushes next to the sidewalk, there by the creek.  Invariably one thing.  Someone with a berry allergy would eat it and have to go to the hospital, or someone would choke on a berry, or eat a rotten one and get food poisoning, or stab their hand with a thorn, or any number of mishaps would take place and they would sue.  And they would win.
 
The fault would fall on the city for not maintaining a healthy berry bush, for not spraying for bugs, for not washing the spray off, and for not putting a nice wax coating on each of the berries to make them look nice.  And because of this neglect, the city would be responsible for anything bad that happened to people eating the berries.
 
You’ll notice, though, that nobody goes around suing the city when their kids eat scrub oak leaves and puke them up, or get hay fever from the lawn, or even if people choose to eat the weird, unidentifiable red berries that nobody has any clue what kind of plant they’re actually growing out of; is that a sapling? A hedge?  Vine?  Wax berry bush??  And if someone did eat those berries, there’s no way they could sue the city because the judge would call them stupid.  They’re responsible for not eating crap that’s not growing in a garden or sitting in a supermarket.  In other words, they knew better than to trust some shady-looking berry standing at a street corner offering some unidentifiable chemical for consumption.
 
But the blackberry, on the other hand, that’s not the person’s fault.  It was only a blackberry.  You see those in the grocery store and you can eat them, for free if nobody’s looking.  So we can just trust the blackberries because they live next door, without ever finding anything out about them or making sure they’re clean, right?
 
It’s so much easier to pass responsibility to someone else, someone that we can get money from.  But I tell you what, one trip underneath the blackberry bush seeing what’s really going on in there taught me a lesson at nine years old that I’ve never forgotten: you can eat as many blackberries off the bush as you want, but if you eat the ones Mom saved for making a pie, your butt’s gonna look like a bowl of raspberries for a week.