She lured me in with the promise of a ripe blackberry bush, but the subsequent obsession was entirely my own. This is a story about my daughter Emily’s last week in Seattle before returning to college and her crazy mother.

Dating back at least 15 years, we used to carry handled baskets in the car with us during late summer in case we found blackberries.

We picked in Discovery Park, by Bitter Lake, on the slope behind North Beach Elementary, along the Burke-Gilman, by the railroad tracks above Shilshole. The goal was enough berries to produce enough jam to get us through the year.

Over the years, we fashioned coat hangers to pull down thorny branches from above our reach. We learned how to remove blackberry stains from our clothes (boiling water poured from at least 10 feet above), and we wore our scratched arms with hubris.

Last May, Emily returned to Seattle after her freshman year feeling at loss in job-hunting because of her mid-August departure. But within a few weeks, she had fashioned summer employment, first taking over Scott McCredie’s electric lawn mowing business for the summer then becoming a pedal cab driver working the Mariner games and waterfront.

Between house-sitting and babysitting, she stopped by the house for occasional laundry and meals while I tried to coax details from her about working nights in downtown Seattle. I also lured her closer to home with a month’s membership at Ballard Health Club and shared desire to go out to breakfast after Core Yoga.

Then, a week ago she lured me to a vacant rental house on Earl where she’d been hired to weed in addition to mowing dandelions.

“There’s a huge blackberry bush,” she told me. “Before it comes down, we should pick it clean.”

I don’t know how long the rental has been vacant – the owners work in Alaska during the summer – but it needed more than weeding. It needed bushwhacking, brush-clearing, machetes, a chain saw at least, in order to reclaim the house from the blackberries, choke weed, juniper and mysterious vines that were further entangling a slew of invasive plants racing to be the first to pull off the gutters, shingles, roof and front porch.

The blackberry bush had stems that were 6 inches in diameter and shoots at least 15-feet high.

A climbing vine had consumed the back porch, even snaking down the basement stairs and into the house through an old cat door.

The juniper bushes in front encroached on half of the sidewalk and even the laurel hedges were bent down by knotted vines.

There was something satisfying about trying to reclaim the house, unplugging the gutter drains and pulling out waist-high dandelions. Plus, there was the blackberry bush, as laden as Emily had promised.

There’s no one explanation. It started with the berries and then seemed like a good way to spend time with Emily before her departure.

She was appreciative when I arrived with cold water and a new assortment of tools. I helped her break down the piles and piles of juniper debris and we took turns standing in the yard waste carts to pack down the brush.

We worked for hours during the unexpected August rain, grabbing lunch in the back seat of a steamy car and then returning to hack and pull at the invaders while water ran down our backs.

But when Emily had another work commitment, I couldn’t pretend it was about spending time with her when I spent four hours by myself wrestling the blackberry bush down from the sky.

I’d cut my way closer to the middle, pick the berries and then cut in again. My face was scratched; there were thorns in my hair, once I even fell back when a bramble broke free.

I couldn’t really fathom why I felt like I had to keep going, although I remember thinking, the blackberry bush is going to win.

Was it because I’d been so impressed with how hard Emily had worked all summer? Was it her muscle tone? Was it that I would be turning 50 in just five days? Was it the promise of my daughter paying me $10 an hour? Did I think that conquering the blackberry bush would keep Emily with me, the daughter who had actually said to me, “You have to let me go.”

The blackberry forest is cut back to it roots, revealing a bush cowering within. The yard is piled in debris and hundreds of suckers. I have a huge mess to clean up at a vacant rental on Earl, and no one to blame but myself.

Then again, I have so much to show for it, stained clothes, future jam, scarred arms and the sweetness of working with my daughter.

Perhaps I didn’t want the job to end, as though it would keep her here with me, but Emily is gone. She walked away from the airport curb without a backward glance.

I’ll have lots of time to think of her summer visit while I rake and bag the debris; the madcap pedal cab ride on the waterfront, our Java Bean stop after yoga, her soft skin beneath my lips the times I dared to hug her and kiss her cheek.

It is my own fault that I am the one still here with fingers stained blue, literally holding the bag.