Letting Go

Having a break while digging out woody blackberry roots beside our glasshouse

It’s a big election week. I could write about how Americans swung heavily towards the Democratic party in their voting, although I’m not sure people voted for the Democrats rather than voting against Trump. I wonder what happens when the Democrats don’t deliver lower inflation or cheaper goods because it’s about the state of the world, not the American economy…

I could also write about the New Zealand election sitting on a knife edge. I could write about NZ First candidate Michael Laws who was a horrible ad hominen debater in the 1980s (when I debated against him as a student) and has changed little to now be a horrible ad feminam commentator.

However, instead of writing about elections, I’m going to write about letting go. I’m a great declutterer but sometimes letting go of things is hard… I was thinking about this while digging up blackberries and gooseberries in our garden. I’ve replanted the gooseberry patch with asparagus and replanted the barely-producing blackberries with a loganberry and a boysenberry which, hopefully, will be better croppers.

The changes make logical sense. Since I stopped eating much refined sugar or anything cooked with refined sugar (after a high blood sugar reading), gooseberries aren’t on the menu. My palate doesn’t like intense sweetness any more and tolerates much more sour, but that doesn’t extend to gooseberries without sweetening. I could use honey but honey is made up of glucose and fructose, just like refined sugar, so the negative effect on my physiology is the same. I could use Stevia, but Stevia is even sweeter than refined sugar so it’s going to push me to want sweeter food. Maintaining a low sugar diet is much easier when I taste sweet things and think, ‘Yuck,’ rather than ‘Yum.’

So that’s it for gooseberries. Except it isn’t. Mum’s gooseberry pie is firmly cemented in my memories. Gooseberry pie with whipped cream (yum). My favourite bit was the pastry coated in sugary syrup with cream on top; the gooseberries were a necessary evil to get the pastry. Gooseberry jam is in there too – red-blushed jam with lumpy gooseberries on Vienna white toast (Dad’s favourite bread) slathered in butter. A caramelised gooseberry leaping off the bread onto the floor. Then there’s top and tailing gooseberries with Mum and Granny in the kitchen, little brown specks jumping determinedly into the clean bowl rather than the waste. Gooseberries have character. Gooseberry was the last jam Mum made before she left 25 Winters Road for a retirement village, after Dad’s death. We gradually ate our way through the jars; they’re long gone now.

I have exactly the same problem with blackberries. Our thornless blackberries at pa harakeke have had two great years out of thirteen. Two hot summers when they produced massively and I gave blackberries away to all our friends. However, most of the time they have taken up space in the vegetable garden and their only service has been shading the glasshouse. Dad trained the runners of his blackberry around the glasshouse every year, twist-tying it to wires attached to the metal struts. In my childhood we’d eat blackberry and apple pie (that yummy pastry again) and blackberry and apple jam. Blackberries take me back even further to when it was a short drive into the country from our house and my parents, grandparents, brother and I would go on an expedition to pick blackberries into buckets along the banks of the Styx River.

“Good riddance to the nasty thorny gooseberries,” is what Chris says. I have plenty of other plants, productive and ornamental, that remind me of my parents and our family home at 25 Winters Road. However, it still feels like an unquantifiable loss…

An apple & blackberry blast from the past: