"But for those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things, fallings from us, vanishings;"

The moment I chose is sort of a large one, occuring on pages 82-83, and is the entire interaction of Seth and Old Jebb in the crib. A highlight of the moment:

"what you shiver fer?" he asked me.

"I'm cold. I'm cold because it's blackberry winter," I said.

"Maybe 'tis and maybe 'tain't," he said.

"My mother says it is."

"Ain't sayen Miss Sallie doan know and ain't sayen she do. But folks don't know everything."

Old Jebb seems to be not only a source of knowledge to Seth, but also a symbol of wisdom. The emphasis on Jebb's physical strength, despite his advanced age, effectively adds mass to the character of Old Jebb; he seems to have a larger hand in Seth's emotional growth than do the characters of his mother and father, and his words have a kind of density about them. What Old Jebb presented to Seth was the inability of a person to truly know something. Old Jebb even questions the month of June itself, ""June," he replied with great contempt. "That what folks say. What June mean?"". Musing on mankind's illusion of control over the natural world, Old Jebb explains to Seth the ease at which the earth my decide to "take a rest", causing "everybody and everything" to die. This idea of impermanence, human fragility, and the "unknowable" clashes with Seth's previous resolution: "When you know something you know it. You know how a thing has been and you know you can go barefoot in June."

The reader sees the breakdown of Seth's "knowledge"; going barefoot in June freezes Seth's feet! Seth's conception of reality, the blackberry winter itself and whether it is occuring at all, is questioned, quite rightly actually (a true blackberry winters occurs in May). The fact that the short story itself is titled "Blackberry Winter" suggests a similar breakdown in "knowing", in the narrator's case, the ability for a person to accurately capture the significance of a memory. Many years separates the adult narrator and the nine year old Seth. Old Jebb's prediction of a tired earth that would stop offering nourishment can be read as the human mind's inability to produce and "grow" in the manner in which it did in younger years. Inevitably, a cold spell comes, and it stays. We end up losing our ability to remember how our youth shaped us. The narrator's statement that he has been following the tramp all these years is just as false to me as Seth's earlier statement about being able to go barefoot in June. Instead, the narrator has been following Old Jebb, who is still alive and present in his life, and who "lived forever" in the story, and in the mind of the narrator.

Question: To what extent is the narrator lamenting his youthful ignorance? Or is the narrator thankful for the "eternal" feelings of childhood, when "what you remember seems forever"?

note: the title is from Wordsworth's Intimations ode