BriarKitt.

Bro de Briarcat

RAMBLE/BRAMBLE

When I was a kid, I used to spend hours just wandering the fields at my grandparents’ farm, about 50-60 miles west of here and out in the middle of nowhere. As farms go, it wasn’t much. A hundred acres, or so, and dirt poor. Literally. Pale, infertile soil half gravel, resting on the Nashville Basin side of the Cumberland/Tennessee watershed.

My grandmother had a garden behind the house, and that was their source for almost any food that wasn’t pork or chicken. She did sell milk from her four or five cows, and usually sold the calves. That helped to pay for flour and sugar, and those other necessities the peddler sold. They raised corn for the hogs and chickens, and hay for the two mules and (rarely) for the cows.

That left most of the farm untilled. Some was woods, and some was pasture, and even the cleared area was pretty rough. Fence rows with full grown locust trees sprouted from green posts and choked with pokeweed and brush. Eroded gullies where the loose dirt heaved with rabbit frost that showed the tracks of the cows and the dogs and foxes and possums and the kid in brown oxfords.
Sedge grass, like brown gold in the winter.

And thickets of blackberry canes and catbriar with phantom paths that disappeared once you were well inside.