Blackberries.

I wiped the blackberry juice off on my bare leg and watched it leave a deep purple mark. It reminded me of home. Blackberry stained and scratched as I stumbled through a thorny patch to get the biggest, juiciest fruit. The prize fruit the bears won't even venture toward for fear of the brambles. But I don't care. I know how good they taste. I emerge grinning with blackberry teeth and arms trickling with blood. Victorious.

What a memory. I memory that cannot be placed in any time. A memory that encompasses my childhood. A memory that could be placed in the summer I was twenty one just as soon as it could be from my fifth summer. It is a memory that goes along with bare, blackened, calloused feet. With brambles caught up in my ever tangled hair. With climbing through hay lofts and dropping down through trap doors into a burly old pony's stall. It slides through my memory hand in hand with dusty dirt roads and dandelion puffs and playing hide and seek in the piles of white, wrapped hay bales.

It is a memory of home, happiness, childhood, and innocence. It is a memory of summer.

But it is not summer. I am not home. I wipe my stained fingers onto my tanned, exposed legs on a March evening in Texas.

On an evening I'm missing home.