When I was growing up in Virginia, every summer my grandmother and her sister Delia would take me huckleberry picking. Huckleberry bushes grew along ditches at the edge of woods, so one had to contend with ticks, chiggers, mosquitoes, gnats, horseflies, and the occasional snake as one picked the fruit. To foil this onslaught of biting varmints, my grandmother would wear a striking outfit that made her look like a character from a Charles-Dickens-Meets-Flannery-O’Connor tale: a long-sleeved, ground-dragging dress, a tall straw-and-linen bonnet, a gauze scarf that fell to her hips, and, most strangely, kerosene-moistened cotton rags tied in bows around her ankles and wrists…
