Cut to this afternoon, when
Well, guess what? From underneath the all-enveloping ferns, which are EVERYWHERE all summer, this now very large and properly equipped blackberry vine has grown up invisibly and twined into the mints. I reach out for a mint sprig, and close my hand around something with fricking THORNS on it, and, well, you know, OW. I teased it out of the mints, after, with a piece of dried fern and now it's on the ground there by the stump, and I swear, the thing has to be three or four feet long with these wicked little thorns.
Blackberries. Whine, whimper, whinge, wail. That damned well HURT. We hatessss the blackberiessss where blackberiesssss shouldn't be, my precioussss. We really hatesssss them. They HURTSSSSSS us.