Poor folks have poor ways
First off you should know that in my family "folks" is pronounced without the L, and "poor" sounds like the "purr" of a cat. When first I heard this saying I was very young. My Pop and I were driving along in the country and I looked out the truck window to see a raggedy little house. Past the house was a field fenced in barbed wire, and on this wire was snared an entire family's washing. I figured the folks' dryer had gone on to greener pastures and so the lady of the house decided to hang all the wash on the first available line. It just so happened that the line was barbed and every single piece of clothing, including what I remember as being some colossal-sized underwear, was hopelessly snarled around it.
I grinned, thinking even a kid like me would have known that the first big wind would create clothing havoc, and I pointed the scene out to my Pop. Instead of chuckling along with me, he shook his head. "Don't laugh," he said, "Poor folks have poor ways." Then he grinned a little. "I was just a kid when I was told that by Grandad. I saw a whole family standing by the dirt road picking blackberries. I laughed and pointed, thinking how silly it was to pick berries in the dust and grit. That was when Grandad told me not to laugh, that poor folks have poor ways."
My Grandad and Granny raised my dad through a lot of his growing up years. His detour with them made a deep mark on him, like a river that has a path all set for it, but then leans away in a different direction for no reason you can see. They were two people who thought my daddy could do no wrong, and he returned the favor.
My folks bought my great-grandparents farm when I was a baby. I lived in the house my Grandad built growing up, and as a wedding gift they gave Hubby and I the back acres to build a home. I have lived on this farm my whole life and have informed my Hubby I will be buried here. (Or probably sprinkled, with a little wild flower seed. But that is another matter!)
We could never be truly poor with such a growing green heaven of woods and fields and creeks to call our own, and yet... every summer finds my boys and I down the dirt road picking blackberries. Yes, our farm has its share, but Hubby brush-hogs all the sunny meadows and where he leaves me bushes there is little sun or water to help the fruit grow well.
Too much water washes the taste from the berry, too much heat makes them small and dried to seediness. This year we have had the perfect combination of rains as soft as patting a baby's back and sunny days only bath-water hot. The bushes are bowed down with blackberries along the roads where we walk, thumb-sized thimbles hanging in tumbles amidst glinting points of wicked thorns.
Last we picked, I emerged from the fence row looking like I had done battle with a maddened cat, and my youngest pointed out where a 2 foot long hank of my hair dangled from the brambles. Chiggered, scratched, fingers and nails ruby-stained and sticky, that is how we limped home with our buckets, wounded but triumphant.
Big berries tumbled into a favorite bowl to be admired before being made into...jelly, jam, cobbler, or perhaps blackberry-mint syrup to stir into ginger ale and lemonade? As I look at them I smile to think, "Poor folks have poor ways."
You ate the first one and its flesh was sweet
like thickened wine: Summer's blood was in it..."~Blackberry-picking by Seamus Heaney
*My very first post! August 2014*
