Hugh’s Notebook

He had lied about his age to go in the Army and ended up flying planes, the Snoopy sort, with open cockpits and goggles and long scarves. After the war he came back to the States, traveled with an air show for a while as a barnstormer and eventually settled down in North Texas, married a fierce half Cherokee and had some kids. My mother’s father was his oldest son.

The thing I remember most about him was his size. He was a large man, standing about 6’5”, barrel-chested and thick. He wore bib overalls and work shirts and had hands the size of canned hams. He was my Great Grandfather, but that was a mouthful for a youngster such as I, so I called him Big’un.

We normally went to see them in the summer when school was out, but this time for some reason, now lost to me, we were there in the fall when the blackberries were in. My Great Grandmother and I had been blackberry picking earlier in the day and in the icebox was sitting a coffee can full of luscious blackberries, so full of goodness they were about to burst. I no longer recall (if I ever knew) where she went, but she told him that when she returned she was going to make a blackberry cobbler with those berries.

She was not gone more than a handful of minutes when he called me into the kitchen. It was a typical (in my experience, anyway) North Texas farmhouse kitchen, with cracked linoleum on the floor, a 1950’s era yellow Formica and stainless steel table and an electric icebox in the corner.

Big’un put me at the table and put two bowls on the table, the porcelain glazing cracked and crazed from years of use. The coffee can of blackberries was retrieved and put in the middle of the table. With his huge, rough scarred hands he poured the blackberries from the can into my bowl and then his. The berries were huge, filling both our bowls to the edge and he poured the fresh cream we had gotten from his own cows that morning over the top, the cream running over the berries, filling in the cracks and crevices until the berries looked like small blue-black islands in a sea of white.

There we sat, in a 4-room house in North Texas, 70 or so years between us, eating our ill-gotten blackberries, sharing the conspiratorial knowledge that regardless of what troubles may come when his wife came back, this day, right now, we were lords of all creation.

Posted by Hugh / @me