BRAZOS IN THE BLUEGRASS

I am a packrat. All my mansions are tiny, crammed rooms.

My wife pronounces me acquisitive, and I know she means that it is a terminal and disreputable condition. I happily plead guilty. Things are great, and getting them is even more delightful than having them. My favorite sound is the gutteral growl of the brown UPS truck pulling onto our street. Will it stop at our house? I don't remember ordering anything, at least not recently. But maybe it will stop. Maybe I forgot. Maybe it's a backorder!

In our tiny yard, only about 50 feet wide and 110 feet long, our house must fight for space with a greenhouse and over forty different fruit trees. In that greenhouse, it is a jungle. As I walk through the narrow walkway (I deliberately made it narrow, so I could get in a few more plants), ivy brushes my bare ankles and thorny blackberry vines unbidden part my hair. The ivy was already there when the seed of a greenhouse germinated in my brain. I could no more have pulled it up from its home than I could have made war on the Indians.

But those blackberries... they were a mistake. Starks sent me the wrong berries. I found out what they sent me were Texas blackberries. They would never make it through the winter here. Starks gave me my money back, and I let the Brazos blackberries spend the winter in my greenhouse. All my blackberries (you are not surprised to hear that I have four different kinds) are thornless. I insist on that. But after that first winter of naive hospitality, I discovered that the green stalks now erupting everywhere in my tiny, jam-packed greenhouse were thorny, shockingly thorny! Brazenly yet innocently they sport their sharp, upturned spurs in a way that reminds me of untamed Longhorn bulls in the Texas bush country from whence these uninvited creatures came. So I learned to be careful.

Still, from time to time one of these unprovoked, back-grabbing, scalp-flaying assaults goes just a tad too far. Dammit! I am a man of mercy and moderation, but enough is enough! Whose greenhouse IS this anyway? The time for forbearance is past. I cuss and fly into the bramble that has broken out of its assigned place in the hard-to-reach corners of the earthen bench. Ruthlessly, anything that even looks like it might think of becoming a blackberry is cut back to the ground. For a while there is decent quiet and spare bareness. But in a week or so, a tender, tentative sprout peeks up through the ivy, its tiny thornlets soft and pliable and no more threatening than a baby bull's bellow. First one here, then one over there, and over there .... I clench my teeth and pull up again all that are too conspicuous, too flagrantly unrepentant. But not all of them. One or two always seem to "escape". How do you figure that?

Anyway, come next spring, when the Kentucky February is gloom and starkness, there will be sprays of white blackberry blossons reaching up for the roof of the greenhouse. And in late March, when spring is still just a rumor outside, those thorny branches will dangle huge, juicy black jewels so close to my lips that I can reach out with only my tongue and accept my "thank you".

It is already springtime on the Brazos, you know.

Ben Feese

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