After a few minutes of creeping along the narrow bank, I reach the trellises and shake out my hands. They’re bleeding and raw from the wild blackberry brambles, still stinging even after rinsing them in the stream until they nearly froze. Biting back a wince, I tear a strip of linen cloth from my apron and wrap up the wounds, both brand new scratches and reopened cuts left from last week’s blackberry delivery.

I tie the cloth tight and start forward again, grasping the wicker basket full of berries. The rows of elegant, rose-furnished trellises form an ironic tunnel to the shoddy orphanage door, with its splintered wood and yellowed paint. Behind it are wilted children with sullen, sunken faces who get too little light and too little love. I should know; I was one of them.

Of course, there’s not much I can do to help them. Although I wouldn’t trade my work as a portrait painter for the world, I barely make enough money to support my own lifestyle, not to mention a child’s. Besides, I fear, I don’t have a motherly bone in my body.

But what I can do is bring them blackberries on Sundays in summer, hopefully to serve as an indication that goodness still exists in the world, though they don’t always see it firsthand.

I inhale sharply, and knock. A little girl with blonde braids is quick to answer with a turn of the doorknob and a crooked-toothed grin.

“Are you here with the blackberries?” she asks, eyeing the basket.

“Well, it is Sunday isn’t it?” I beam at her, motioning for her friends to gather, and from across the dusty room, the matron gives me a grateful smile. They light up like daffodils in April as I place the ripe blackberries into their hungry hands; I see myself in each of their eyes. My heart softens with every “thank you” I receive, healing the scars of my dismal childhood, replacing them with a warmth so lovely I forget the pain was ever there to begin with.

As I make my reluctant departure, dozens of children call out to me amid the damp and the dark, waving with indigo-stained hands, savoring the berries: intoxications of life’s morning. And I hope, earnestly, that their futures ensure they are delirious with such joy evermore.