I include a photo of a blackberry that remains along Thea Foss waterway. Today a story in the News Tribune
tells how a developer expects to remove growing produce from a site within a few weeks. Blackberries are pretty hardy, the blackberry canes develop fast and are thick. But the story is about agriculture, berries and pumpkins, the remaining growing things in Fife. It is sad that between two large cities, Seattle and Tacoma, farmland close at hand can no longer be present. Next Friday the Puyallup Fair begins, so many people are drawn to the experience that can no longer mean what it meant. The lost farmland is experienced as the drapery of grief - white in Japan, black in Western culture - grief for the actual removal of color. I think of songs - (I saw Bob Dylan perform at the Puyallup Fair one year) the song, "The Man in the Long Black Coat" or the Rolling Stones "Paint it Black". All that color and beauty gone. Others may experience the removal of developed produce as a deranged waste of food, in a time when the price paid is so high and it is so wrong to waste food. In this situation, the farmland is destroyed, so the loss of one crop, one season, cannot be evaluated when the actual time element is "gone forever".
