The Berry Patch

The local berry farm closed a few years ago.  That was a sad day for me.  The farmer’s kids didn’t have the desire to keep up the family land that had for so long produced juicy strawberries in late June and then perfectly honeycombed raspberries (purple and red) right on their tail.  In late July, there’d be blueberries so fat and sweet you could pop them right in you mouth. Sugar would have been redundant.

The closing of the patch was a loss to many of us locals and summer people and anyone who enjoys the ritual of growing or gathering their food understands why. Not only was there something satisfying about serving my family fresh, local grown berries, but there was a sense of accomplishment in picking them myself.

Heading to the berry patch was really more about communing and about companionship.  Bent over or on my knees between the rows of green bushes, dragon flies humming, and crickets chirping, the field was my church at times, the ritual a kind of morning vespers. Berry picking was something I did with my friend Liza (aka “Groove” a nickname from the 70’s, the exact origin of which has been lost).  Liza and I grew up on our little lake bay in the summers. She is the oldest continual friend I have and two of our children were born in the same years.  They have inherited their friendships by birth, an unspoken powerful connection.  Those ties go deep.

In the many years that Liza and I berry-picked, we survived the eye-rolling and the ridicule over our dogged devotion while the short season lasted.  Together and alone we braved hot temperatures, rain and mist, bugs and flies all to find our peace, chatting and picking, talking and advising, finding the rhythm of the row as we filled the little green cardboard boxes and loaded them onto the farm’s hand nailed wooden trays.

It was the conversation that counted, more than anything.  As our hands felt down the stalk, determining the firmness of a berry, our eyes focused on the color and our minds were free to talk.  Picking was also about tending a friendship, sustaining the strong parts and feeling tenderly for the weaker places.  Nothing was off-limits, in that easy way that lifelong friends have with one another.  We covered kids and parenting, picked over our marriages and memories and reinforced summer rituals we’d now instilled in our own children; Monday night square dancing, Friday night s’mores at the campfire. We gossiped and swapped stories.  We ate handfuls of berries straight from the vine.  Being in the patch accomplished many things.

When they were younger, Liza and I would drop our kids at the morning camp and race to the patch to pick and talk.  As they got older and able to join in, we’d occasionally bring them in the afternoons.  Even the most zealous berry picker soon became bored by our itinerant worker staying power.   They soon lost interest.

At home, berries were eaten plain or became ingredients for my annual ritual of jam-making.  I loved jam days; the washing, boiling and canning, ladling the sluggish ruby mixture into the cut glass Ball jars and later affixing the personal labels my artist friend Laura made for me.  The jams were my gift to dear friends at the holiday, a little bit of summer vacuum sealed in a jar.

It hasn’t quite been the same without the patch.  Yes, there are berries aplenty in the farmers markets around.  But it’s not the same.  It’s not like passing the field weekly and noting the height of the bushes, watching the farmer on his tractor and feeling the anticipation of opening day with the fervor of a baseball fan.  I miss the satisfying heft of lifting my pallet on the scale to be weighed, of stashing the boxes of fruit in the back of my car and closing the tailgate.

There’s talk of a new patch opening next year.  The plants are supposedly in the ground now, although I can't see them from the road.  Liza and I have more luxury of time as our children have aged.  In the absence of berry picking, we’ve found other places and ways to commune, on hikes with the dogs, in chairs at the beach with sunhats covering our heads.  Will we still find the same magic in the patch, that moment of release from our homebound selves?  Will our pattern be broken, our devotion lessened by the long break in our ritual?  I’ll let you know next summer.  

Dahlia Days

I have a theory that people are either cooks or gardeners first.  OK… relax.  I’m not saying you can’t DO both. I think everyone has a favorite and my clear winner (because cooking involves cleaning up and gardening, not so much) is to be out in my garden.

I’ve got one word for summer:  DAHLIAS

 

Yup.  Dahlias are my favorite flower ever.  They come in so many varieties of color, size, shape and petal. Each one is a mini work of art.  The names themselves are pure fun;  Bodacious, Envy, Freedom Fighter, Maniac, Mango Madness and Cabana Banana, to name just a few. And merely tending to them I find complete zen planting, cutting and arranging.  Nature puts me in the right frame of mind: green, sunshine, air, quiet.

 

My kids and husband call it “Dahlia Mania” and they all roll their eyes when the box of tubers comes each year from Oregon’s Swan Island Dahlia Farm in April.  

 

“You love your flowers more than us, Mom” my kids accused me of once.  And there are times it’s true. Flowers don’t talk back or require boundaries and limits.  They don’t need balanced meals.  They just keep producing beauty.

 

The first thing I do is plant them in pots to get them started, as they are ultimately bound for my garden up north.  Dahlias are not really ideal for pots, so if you can put them straight in the ground, that’s best. Here they are at phase one—just out of my garage.  You don’t water at all until the first green shoots sprout through the dirt.

I get them in the ground on Memorial Day and place the stakes near, as I know they will do a lot of growing in a month, but still not produce flowers until mid-July in my hearty North Eastern growing zone. Loving dahlias is about being patient, not about immediate gratification.  Their really prolific season is August and September, even into October they produce magnificent blooms until the first frost. 

Here they are in the ground. Freed from their pots:

But I was in for a shock when I returned to the cottage at the end of June for the summer… What the ding dang bejesus?  Deer had munched my dahlias on the side garden.  They’d never done that before. And this created a blood boil. 

But the great thing about flowers and plants is that they grow back, kinda like nails and hair.  So check this out.  A few homemade cages with my wire cutters and voila, flowers on the mend.

And now?  The first flowers of the season…..

So wherever you find YOUR zen, at the shore, in the mountains, the lake, or  the city,  I hope you find it somehow in nature.  Here are a few more for you to enjoy and I’ll post some of the photos in my gallery as late summer and fall progresses. 

The Yellow Boat

“Whoa!” I jumped up off my beach chair and began waving my hands in the air over my head, trying to get his attention. “Slow down!!!!” I did a thumbs down move designed to get him to cut the speed. My Dad had just barreled past the five mile an hour buoys in the bay at a fast clip and brushed too-near a kayaker in our busy August bay who was shepherding three swimmers. As he raced past her, oblivious of the speed, she set her paddle down and turned her head. I could not see her expression up close but her body language said everything. My Dad was flying, but the look on his face was priceless. He was in heaven. For him, the open water was the last place in his life, the last place on earth, that he had any autonomy. It was a sunny day and puffy white clouds were just beginning to poke over the tops of the mountains. The lake was calm, his grandkids were on the beach, the wind was in the wisps of his hair and plastered across his face was a big, self-satisfied grin. My Dad has Dementia, or maybe it will soon be diagnosed as Alzheimers. I don’t much care what the term is. He is, little by little, being erased. The strong parts, the parts that cared for me and supported me are now fading. It is the three of us, his daughters, who now care for him with our Mom. Finally, a few yards beyond our raft, he saw me with my arms signaling wildly. His face fell, childlike in disappointment. I could tell he wasn’t sure exactly what he had done wrong, only that something was wrong. I was angry, maybe overly angry because I had been his last advocate. I’d been the one arguing the case to keep his dignity intact for just a few more weeks till summer came to an end. We’d taken away his driver’s license on the road, stripped him of independence in so many other areas. He’d always been a careful boater and I’d argued that if we kept watch on the shore, or volunteered to accompany him on each trip, that we could make it through this summer. By next summer it would be a whole different story. I admonished automatically in the same tone my mother uses, like an adult patronizes a child. “Dad, you were going too fast. Dad, you almost hit the kayak. Dad, there is a five mile an hour limit.” He deflated. “Well, I guess this is my, my swan song,” he stammered. His face was cloudy, his head down like a recalcitrant child. I marveled that he had pulled that phrase out of nowhere. That was a flash of my old, eloquent Dad. I argued with my sisters. “Lee, he cannot drive the boat anymore. No more boat. He is going to kill or maim someone,” said my youngest sister Meg. “Well, kill isn’t good but maim might be acceptable,” I said, to break the ice. We McConaughys were known for our gallows humor, always a wonderful diffuser to deal with strong emotions and overcharged moments. “Yeah, I guess if he just clipped off an ankle on a swimmer that wouldn’t be too bad,” said Nancy, rolling her eyes. “We’re just going to have to find a way around this, “ I said. “We need to have someone go out with him when he goes. That way we can gently remind him of the speed limit.” “We have to hide his keys,” said my sister Meg. And so, because it was two against one, we put them in a secret place in the boathouse. This way he would have to find one of us to remember where his keys were. The next day, by the time he found me, he was anguished, all riled up. He told me he had been looking for his keys for a long time. “Lets check here,” I said reaching into a coffee can. “Maybe you put them here,” I tried to keep my voice non-chalant and level, despite the deception. He looked pained, searching his memory, I assumed, for why the man who always removed his shoes indoors and carefully hung his keys on a peg each afternoon would ever put them in a rusty coffee can. He jangled the keys in his palm. “Dad, I’d love to go,” I said. “Would you take me?” It was the last thing I felt like doing. I’m not a huge boat person. Nerdy, I know, but I’d much rather read a book. I had just gotten down to the dock and spread out my towel, pulled my novel out of the beach bag. I unclipped the ropes from the dock cleat and we puttered out past the five-mile-an-hour buoys. We crossed to the other side of the lake. Sitting at the bow of the boat I helped him see the markers, gently using hand signals to indicate the rocks he needed to go around. He nodded each time. This kind of muscle memory would probably be the last to go in some ways. He’d been driving this bright yellow Boston Whaler and its aluminum predecessor before that for decades. He knew the lake and its craggy shoreline instinctively. We glided past the multi-colored sails of Sunfishes and poked into a deep bay where a turtle hopped off a log. We stared up at the face of a cliff where once, as a young man, he had climbed and almost perished before he grabbed for a small root sticking out of the rock. We had made him tell that story to us a hundred times as kids. “You wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for that root,” he’d say, sweeping his arm up toward the cliff. And we’d all stare upward, imagining my father, young and muscled, pulling himself up the face of the cliff with sheer will. He had taken us to this spot a hundred times by boat. Now, a mile across the lake from our own beach, I felt the wind tousle my hair, felt my shoulder muscles relax. I looked back at my Dad, so proud and in control at the steering wheel. This was heartbreaking, this slow leaving, this long and sputtering good-bye. What did he remember? What had he forgotten? Later that night he grabbed me and pulled me to him, for the moment confusing my name with that of my sisters, but the emotion is clear. “I love you so much,” he says to me. “I am so proud of you.” “I love you too Dad,” I say, breathing in the faint mothball scent of his summer shirt. Its muscle memory for us both.

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