Blackberries, Blackberries by Crystal Wilkinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Crystal Wilkinson has managed to capture in this text a series of expressive, heartfelt, funny, sorrowful, sentient, and somber vignettes of life amongst folk in the wide open range and spread out places. The problems are the same, but there is a need for a community to draw together even with the distance of two counties between them.
Each story reads like a snapshot. It reminds me of visiting my Grammy Kathy or Great Aunt Ethel and looking through one of their photo albums where each picture had a weaving, winding, and interconnected story behind it that tied richly into every other picture.
Kathy and Ethel made ceramic figurines. So many ceramic figurines. Ethel had an entire addition onto her house filled with these magnificent creations. Each one carried a story or a sentiment filled within it. You could imagine that her library of ceramics were a million little pieces of her life that she was sought to give away before she passed. And give she did. Her and Kathy. Every time we or someone else would visit, they would leave with one of those ceramic figurines.
This series is a book of ceramics that makes you hearken back to your own stories that you carry from before your elder country folk became city folk and life got a little different than it was before.