1963 Blackberry Picking & Other Things
Johnny ,Dicky and I was always coming up with ways to make money . Johnny and Dicky had a shoeshine business Johnny had his in grandaddy Bastin barber shop and Dicky would walk the streets of Linden to do his shoe shine business I sold seeds in the spring and we sold salve in the fall months ,Johnny sold cards also there was all kinds of job ideas in comic books and also what you could get when you sold your items on the back of comic magazines .
We knew we could make a small fortune picking blackberries we figured we could pick and sell at least 3 or 4 gallons for 50 cents a gallon on this day . Grandmother Averett always warned us of the dangers ahead even if she had already told us she would tell us again…Now watch out for snakes their was a woman that got snake bite not long ago it was awful ,just awful a rattlesnake bite her while she was picking blackberries . Come on Dicky grab your bucket.. If we hurry up that will can get 4 gallons Grandmother was still telling us stuff.Now dont make me come looken for you ,ok grandmother we want..I said j Dicky always knew where the biggest, juiciest blackberries were and he knew where all of the caves were too,although we had been told not to go in the one across the road on top of the bluff.. and we didnt go across the road ,but we knew a secret way to go across the road it was a secret tunnel ,it was close to Dickys treehouse we could see all over the world from that treehouse the tree was so big we couldnt put our arms all away around it even if Johnny was there. We thought that we would just go look at the cave and then pick the blackberries we went by way of the creek thru the tunnel and climbed the bluff we watched for snakes and didnt see any although we did see some snake doctors ..by the time we got through looking at the cave and done some figuring on how we might could climb down it we knew we had been gone for a while we knew grandmother would be looking for us and we still didnt have our blackberries . We knew we better do some fast picking Grandmother didnt take to good for us not minding her..We did get on with it and got one gallon our money making plans didnt go as we had planned but grandmother bought the blackberries and we made 25 cents a piece we were ok when grandmother pulled that bubbling blackberry cobbler out with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on it..and we had some future plans in the making about the cave we wondered why they didnt want us to go in this one cave ..but we had had a big day and we knew that would be for another day…
