A sink full of berries

I have never been much of a berry person, oh I'll eat blueberries on vanilla ice cream every once in awhile but that's about the extent of my berry diet. I do make one exception, that's for the dewberry.
The other day someone gave me a pint of blackberries and since the blackberry is a cousin to the dewberry I decided to try them. Well Mr. Blackberry you are sure no Mr. Dewberry! In my home town dewberry picking is a tradition and a money maker for some. Every spring hardly souls are willing to brave brambles, fight snakes, devilishly ichy chiggers, fire ants and poison ivy for the tart sweet morsels of fruit growing wild in rugged places. The dewberry plant forms thickets of thorny vines and grows in places most people would not tread.
Dewberries with sugar on them was ok but my favorite was dewberry cobler. I can still remember how good that cobler was that mother made. I can imagine one of those coblers now. Mom cooked them in a large glass bowl and the dark berry juice was always bubbling out from the top of the browned crust and oozing down the sides of the bowl.
You can't buy dewberries in the stores, the fruit is too fragile to survive packing and shipping. They ripen earlier than other berries making them a hallmark of Texas spring just as the bluebonnet is. Durning the months of April and May Dad was always bringing home gallons of dewberries and our kitchen sink was full of floating dewberries guite often. He usually paid six bits a gallon for the berries, that's 75 cents for you city foke. Today blackberries are priced at $3 for half a pint.
Dewberry picking is fading as new generations prefer to get their blackberry cobler in the frozen food section at their local supermarket. Beside most of today's generation can't even began to make a cobler of any kind.
Seems like I used to see the wild dewberry everywhere but today, weed killer and the constant maintenance of out road sides and rail ways have destroyed decades of old dewberry patches.
It has been a long time since I have baked a dewberry cobler and even then it was not as good as the ones I remember mom baking. The only cobler I bake these days is a peach cobler and with peach season right around the corner I better put an extra five pound bag of sugar on my shopping list. It would not be July the fourth without a peach cobler.