Warming Dinner

For pretty much every birthday dinner of my life, my mother has served me the same dessert.

She produces a cake, naturally, but also invariably provides sliced, peeled fresh peaches mixed with thimbleberries. You might know thimbleberries as blackberries; big, juicy, tart/sweet berries containing a lot of seeds whose canes feature the nastiest thorns in the world. I love the berries, but the thorns are so horrible I hated picking them on the farm where I grew up, so I try not to eat them, not wanting to be a hypocrite.

However, every year, my mother brings out the 'special' antique cut glass bowl used for birthdays and other special occasions and fills it up with a concoction of berries, peaches and sugar, which leads to a sweet and sticky syrup. It's all very delicious.

This year, there will be no berries in the mix. The berries flowered in the early sunshine, a big crop came in (albeit mostly for the racoons who ravaged the patch), and it was all over three weeks ago.

There have been years when there were only a few berries and they were very small at the end of the season, but I've never had no berries at all in the soupy deliciousness.

Three weeks.
Think about that, in an 'inconvenient truth' kind of way.
It has me wondering if my birthday dinner is a sign of climate change.