Gardening is an exercise in stubborn, fragrant faith: that these sticks you hold in a feathery root ball will somehow turn pliant and shoot wild into the sunshine, offering fruit when you least expect it. But that's just what happened when my husband and I planted our first blackberry bush in late February on an unusually warm weekend here in Oxford, Mississippi, just before the pandemic.

For months, I was stubborn. I kept watering my sticks. Storms pounded our garden so hard, I thought for sure those sticks would wash away. But they held fast. And turned green and leafy. Then tiny white blossoms gave way to juicy whole blackberries by July. My sons gathered them in a blue bowl for their cereal in the morning. When the small harvests became less plentiful, the boys suggested that a fox or a bear might have visited first—but their giggles (they couldn't even say it with a straight face) and their purpled chins and fingertips gave them away. By the hotswell of the pandemic that first August, I was thinking of the Mary Oliver poem that ends with the lines "the black bells, the leaves; there is / this happy tongue."

Children have few markers of time. I love that mine keep—as my youngest calls it—"fruit time." May means strawberries, June is peaches, August equals watermelons, and September is persimmons. Now they have blackberries figured late into their summer and into their school year (here in the South, school starts in early August). They know blackberrying as a verb. And since they were virtual learning that year—Zooming into their classes on a picnic table—one of their small joys was to get up between classes, wander over to the blackberry bush (which had grown taller than both of them in just a few months), and pop a few sun-ripened drupelets into their mouths. A warm startle of juice edged the corners of their smiles when they weren't careful.

Since we were all outside so much during that time, we didn't need a scarecrow or a whistle to shoo away the birds. It made me remember my youth—finding a blackberry patch with my neighbor when we were 11, and oh, the work it took to gather a small cup full of them. But the sweetness was worth all the forearm scratches and pricks. We drew blood to gather blood-dark juice. Juice brilliant enough that people use it to dye hair. During the Civil War, blackberry tea helped alleviate dysentery, and sometimes temporary truces were called so Union and Confederate soldiers could pick blackberries together.

I still haven't completely processed all we lost during these two years of the pandemic, how many funerals not attended, how many friendships strained under the weight of not seeing each other for years. I still haven't been able to pay my respects to my last grandparent to leave this planet: my paternal grandmother in India, who died not of COVID but of old age. But blackberries gave us back a little bit of faith, gave us such bounty for our patience. When my sons gather the fruits, they share space with butterflies and wasps in our yard, even a few skinks and anoles. These are also their classmates. My sons learn from them. And why not?

We shelter together in the cool shade, turn our faces to the sun, perk up when we hear a mockingbird, celebrate an evening rain shower. We close our laptops, put away our phones. We talk of getting another bush next year. Make plans to visit their grandparents again. This happiness on our tongues will last us for years.

This article appeared in the Summer 2022 quarterly edition with the headline "Keeping Fruit Time."