Blackberry Bowel

SCENE: Driving down rural road outside of small town Oregon

Sam: “What’s a blackberry bowel?”

Parents: “Err…”

Now here’s God’s honest truth: I know what blackberry bowel is.

There is little I like to eat more than fruit. When I was a kid and we lived in a neighborhood that had residual orchard trees, my mother set limits on how much I could eat per day (no more than 8 apples) and the instant I owned dirt, I planted 28 fruit trees in my yard. Thus, I am familiar with many varieties of fruit bowel: apricot bowel, watermelon bowel, peach bowel, plum bowel, fig bowel, etc.¹ and just this week I became reacquainted with blueberry bowel when I consumed in excess of one gallon of u-pick Willamette Valley berries in one day (no regrets).

So in that moment of pause, what I really could not figure out was how Sam had chanced upon the term.

We solved the mystery of how fruit bowel had become known to our 13 year old when we returned and saw the sign that he read incorrectly while flying by at highway speed. Then we worked on our own case of the affliction.