When I was a kid in Lafayette, Louisiana, my parents and a friend of the family went in together on a piece of farmland. For a year or two, we spent many a Sunday there. We picked dewberries in late spring, blackberries in early summer, figs in mid-summer, corn in late summer, persimmons in the early fall. Our friend's son made little crawfish traps out of chicken wire, and would leave them near or in the coulee. There were insects known as mosquito hawks that were slender and graceful in flight. They would perch on the barbed wire fence. Some were powder blue, some green, some yellow. I got stung once at the edge of my right eye by a wasp. There were ant hills over a foot high. These ants didn't sting and were larger than the fire ants that were starting to show up around that time. Roly-poly bugs and June bugs were abundant. There was a sink hole we had to watch out for, and occasional snakes. We kept an eye out for water moccasins. **** Near the coulee in the back, we'd find the best blackberries, some as big as a small plum. We would bring several bucketsful home at a time. **** As a child, I didn't know the names of trees, except for a couple of chinaball trees that attracted some specific commentary because of the berries dropped all over the ground. Trees weren't as frequently and aggressively pruned back then; the branches hung low, and there were very old vines, some as thick as a grownup's arm. We could climb them, or sit and swing on them comfortably in the shade from the branches above. Little birds would flit around the undergrowth. Birds also feasted on the berries, figs, and persimmons as they ripened. The land was a kind of shared paradise, and was called Paradise Farm.