Blackthorn

It's hard to time it right. It's not a day you can plot or plan for; it's not a
science. If anything, it's pure coincidence: the picking of ripe sloes. There's
an impossible week just before the children come, and just after the frost sets
in. If you snatch them in an impatient rush before the ice falls, they'll be so
inedible and bitter that you'll gag on them; if you wait any longer, they'll be
filling another woman's winter larder, sweet and waxy and blue as young plums.
Timing is all.

She'd often ask why I'd want sloes at all. They're hardly right for pie making or
lunch boxes, she'd scoff; they're not plums, after all. But that's what you'd
say if you'd forgotten about sloe gin, or sloe liquor, or sloe wine - the
libations of an autumn glut preserved in dusty bottles to dole out when the
weather turns. She didn't scoff then. Then it was late nights talking and
slurring and laughing; no one talked about plums when they were sticky and
joyful with sloes in the dead of winter. You just add sugar: that's the trick.
It's an ancient way to preserve the last of the season.

Even
the name is ancient. It's 'sloe' or 'slah' in almost every language in Europe.
You could be miles from home and not understand a single word, but you'd know
'sloe': it's an ancient, monosyllabic pit of a word – a stone at the heart of
Old English, the same as 'house', 'wife' or 'cow'. It's a solid word to return
to. But you must play it by ear and don't invest too hard with your heart. You
can't count on the fruit each year. If you hope for it too hard, of course, you
might miss it all together.

The first time we'd set out in wellies and the frost had polished the berries like bird eggs. We hadn't even been looking for
them - just a walk before dinner, and to listen to the church bells. A wedding,
I think. She'd popped one in her mouth and squinted with the tartness. We'd
laughed all day at nothing. Even the scratches from the thorns seemed like jokes
told on the skin. I told her that they called women like her
"sloe-eyed", back in those pastoral days, when words were from the
soil. She took it as an offence, I think; a little burst of discord to end the
spring.

They used to honour days like that. On St Brigid's day, when the blackthorn
flowered, or Imbolc: the goddess blossoming on the sloe bush in the lane. In
those flowers lay the promise of longer days, pregnancies, weddings, the
lambing season; the washing, polishing and fruiting of new life. They'd pour
milk and porridge and honey on the ground beneath the coin-like leaves and hope
for the best. It's a fragile hope; the flowers, as you can see in botanical
studies, are thin and soft and vulnerable to biting winds.

It's a cure for loneliness, to think about those days: my days, their days, right
back to the mummified remains of the long dead with sloe pits in their bellies.
Even now, straying through the fog on the lanes, numb with cold, I can see why
we came here each year. But there's a trick to it, perhaps; a sense of timing
and experience I never had. You see, the sloe bushes are easily confused with
other variants, if you're not careful: the same leaves, the same flowers, but
the wrong fruit when the time comes. Blackthorn has always been a deceptive
one, really; rag and bone men would sell their bitter leaves as Indian tea. But
even if you actively seek out that black wood, you can still get hurt - if
you're numb, you won't feel the cuts from the thorns, and cuts can get infected
from the sheep grease or barbed wire. You can get tetanus and your jaw will be
wired shut.

But you can't think like that. It's the sacrifice you make, she'd say in those
years, and we'd walk home with pots overflowing with, what seemed like,
inexhaustible sweetness.