The Sweetest Fruit

They were preserving more than blackberry jam

- MARCI SEITHER

My phone pinged just as I got home from the grocery that summer morning with ingredients to bake scones. A text from my 21-year-old daughter, Amy.

"Do you want to come up for a few days?" she wrote. "We can pick berries and make jam."

Amy, the second youngest of our six children, lived in Northern California, near where she'd grown up, an eight-hour drive from our house in San Diego. Pandemic stay-at-home orders had been lifted. An invitation to enjoy one of our absolute favorite activities together? That should have made my heart sing. Instead, I set my phone on the counter and distracted myself by putting away the groceries. More than an eight-hour drive separated my daughter and me.

Amy was bright, an excellent student in high school. She'd been interested in pursuing sports medicine. After graduation, my husband, John, and I assumed she would go directly to the university close to our home. Instead, she wanted to take a year off from school.

"You're going to college in the fall," I told her. "I don't want you losing your focus." She agreed to attend the local junior college and then transfer to the university.

But she didn't end up applying for the transfer. "I'm done with school," she announced with no further explanation after her first year in junior college. That summer, friends with a farm in Ohio invited her to come work as a farmhand. Amy leaped at the opportunity. A farmhand? I thought. What does she know about farming? Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. Amy had never chosen the easy path.

I remembered the day I picked her up from high school and she excitedly told me what she'd learned in science class. "The blackberry bushes with thorns are sweeter than the one without thorns," she said. "When you modify them and take off the thorns, you compromise the taste."