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Gretchen emerged from the head-high canes of our blackberry patch, her hat slightly askew, her basket brimming with glistening thimble-sized berries and a long scratch across the back of her picking hand oozing a thin line of red. She smiled as she shooed away a mosquito.

“Almost done.”

She came to the picnic table in our cook shelter and began rolling the berries carefully into small plastic pint containers she has been saving from our blueberry purchases for just this purpose. We carried the filled containers to the cooler and stacked them next to the ice frozen in milk containers.

Using the small containers protects the berries from being crushed so they can be frozen and retain their juices for the day sometime this fall when they will be turned into jam.

This was our second trip this year to our land near Lodi thinking that we would hit the peak of the picking. Our first visit in late July started this way: I was setting up the tarp over the picnic table and chasing a mouse out of the cook stove when I heard Gretchen say, “Oh, oh.”

She was standing at the edge of the patch, which is the size of a suburban lawn, looking in. I joined her; we could see only one ripe blackberry among the millions that were green or with tinges of red. After lugging all our camping gear about 100 miles we weren’t about to leave, so we enjoyed a few days in camp anyway.

Two weeks later, we could see ripe berries as we set up camp under blue skies with breezes to cool us. We took advantage of the growing shade from the woods and picked into the evening. The quiet of our endeavor was broken only by the warble of the indigo bunting and occasional yelps of thorn-prick pain.

Gretchen and I have different picking styles. I wage war with the canes, trying to match the savagery of the long thorns and tangled thickets. I use my boots and a heavy leather glove on one hand to force my way through the tangles. I wear eye protection. And I rage at the cane that recoils and hits me from behind.

But Gretchen slips among the canes picking happily, her only concession to safety a long-sleeved shirt. Watching her pick berries is to observe the practice of Zen.

Gretchen knows I don’t have quite the same affection for the blackberry patch that she does.

We took a break to observe and photograph a gray-green tree frog that she found clinging to a leaf. “Thanks for indulging me in this,” she said kindly, referring to our annual date in the patch.

Then with a wicked grin, “If you had to choose, which would you rather do, pick berries or go to my class reunion?”

I should have said that I love them both equally, but instead mumbled something about it not being a fair question and headed off into the canes to fill my basket before we quit for the evening.

Then, in the calm of dusk as the wood thrush began to sing Gretchen brought a small kettle from the wood stove to the table. It was a blackberry-peach cobbler and suddenly Gretchen’s primal connection to her hunter-gatherer forebears seemed like a very good thing indeed.