Before my father died in 2006 I had lunch with him. I wanted to know a few things before he died and one of those things was what his first job was. He didn’t say anything about his job at Thom McAn, or any of the other jobs he held as an adult. He remembered picking blackberries at the age of five.

Blackberries grew wild in W. Virginia where he was born in the midst of the Great Depression. He was the oldest of his family of seven. At the time his brother Robert would have been two or three years old, his sister still an infant. He picked a pail of blackberries and when he went to sell them to some neighbor ladies they took the berries and gave him a nickel, not the 50 cents he asked for. He felt, some 70 years later, the bitterness and anger of that moment. I could hear it in his voice. He carried that resentment almost seven decades. They had “robbed,” him, he said. I wish our salads hadn’t come at that point. The waiter interrupted and the conversation turned to other things.

Today I wandered out along the stream that runs by my office and saw a wild blackberry bush. I was in shorts and a halter-top and not about to risk my soft vulnerable skin, but I got as close as I could to the bush. If you’ve never picked blackberries before you should know they have more vicious thorns than any rose bush. It’s impossible to pick blackberries without getting stuck, scratched and pricked by the thorns. As I picked a mere handful of berries (and pricked my thumb and arm in the process) I thought about my dad, and what he must have gone through to pick a bucket of berries. At five he was too short to reach the berries that sway high, and relatively thorn free at the top of the bush. He had to endure some hot, sweaty, nasty work to get that pail filled.

To get the berries before the birds and insects get them, and to endure the heat of summer when they’re ripening is hard, hot work.

I feel for him. No one was there to tell him he didn’t have to take the neighbor’s nickel. He could have declined, found another buyer willing to meet his price, or taken the berries home for his mother to make into jam. Instead, that experience sowed the seed of resentment and suspicion in him that carried him through life where he sowed it in me - that people will cheat you, steal from you and not value you or your time or product. He lived his life by that belief and I know I’ve done the same. Learning where our stories come from and working to change them is also hard, hot, nasty work. That’s why so few of us do it. It hurts.

Part of writing, of journaling and exploring our personal histories and changing involves looking at the stories we tell ourselves. Seeing where they came from and where they got their energy helps us dissipate or recharge the energy as needed. He was right. People will steal, cheat and rob you. They won’t value you and they will scam, lie and use you. But people will also be generous, giving, and helpful with their time, money and resources. They will be supportive, encouraging and loyal. The trick is to find the people who value you and ignore the ones who don’t.