Blueberry Season (short story)

Blueberry Season

A Short Story

©Jane Piirto. All Rights Reserved

    The long wet grass yielded as if with surprise as she cut through it, its tangles never having been brushed by a human leg. Her walking shoes were wet by now, but white buck shoes are sturdy, and very good for walking in the woods; these had, for years, and didn’t look to collapse now. The blueberry bucket, a plastic aqua gallon wash pail with a twisted coat hanger handle, had seen its years of service also, and had carried from these woods and fields many treasures, including her first Boletus edulis, which she had recognized after taking the mycology course last winter.  When she brought the mushroom to class, the instructor and the rest of them had to give her the crown, the honor of having found the most edible field mushroom that month.

   She walked through a stand of white birches and searched for the two trees that formed a sort of arch, where the path could be found. Few people came into the woods these days, too busy watching television, but the path was still there, reappearing after every winter as if by magic, for it wasn’t a wide path, nor a well-traveled path, but it had been here ever since she had lived near these woods, forty years now since they had moved to town after working in the Navy Yard in Virginia during the War.

   They said, though, that the path the people on the Oregon Trail had taken with their covered wagons, was still visible on the prairies of South Dakota, even after the harsh winds and weathers of Dakota winters for over a hundred years, so maybe woods and fields received paths much as rock or marble received a sculptor’s chisel; even on alpine tundra, the path the Ute women and children used to take over the 12,000 foot mountain passes in Rocky Mountain National Park were still visible, and the weathering there had to be immensely severe. If you didn’t know the path was here, between these two birches, you’d never see it from the field below. One winter, cross-country skiers had tied fluorescent plastic ribbons on the trees to mark the path, but they had tattered, and were gone now, and she was glad.

As she ambled along the ridge she almost called for Greta, and had to stop herself from looking back or to the side for the sleek black creature, who would be ranging by now, exploring animal holes and dens, but Greta was most likely dead by now. Eight months since she had disappeared into a Christmas eve snowstorm down at her daughter’s place in Lower Michigan, and people kept saying that dogs have a homing instinct and appear on the doorstep after months, or even years, but she felt the dog to be dead, a black Labrador velvet lump frozen in some snowbank next to I-75, and she couldn’t imagine how the dog would get across the Mackinac Bridge without having someone notice; she had told the people at the Bridge to be on the lookout for a female Lab when she had crossed back after the holidays, and she had heard nothing.

“Greta?” she said out loud when the image got too strong, or the memory. Her voice was rarely used these days, except to talk to the mailman or to the neighbor down the road, or to a friend on the telephone, or to sing in church. She thought about her voice over the years, how it had been used in crying, laughing, soothing, yelling, cooing, gasping. Such a good thing, a voice, and so taken for granted, as she knew that she could speak if she wanted to, even if it had now been two days since she had used it, to answer a wrong number on the telephone. Her daughters and son chided her, told her to get another dog, to have a person come and live in; after all, you’re getting older now, Mother; but she’d said, I’ve had animals—pets, children, people living with me—all my life, and I want to see if I can live alone with my own self. Loneliness isn’t the worst thing in the world, you know. Just to see whether her voice would still do it, she let out her Tarzan yell, the one that she used to amuse the grandchildren. Fine. That voice worked fine.

Still, it would be good to have a dog—Greta—a pet—as a companion, especially on these walks in the woods.  Last year Greta had turned fierce and had dashed into the underbrush after something—a bear?—right around here, just about this time, blueberry season, though she’d never seen a bear out here. The newspaper said just the other day that the bears were coming out of the woods into the towns; several had been sighted outside Marquette, because this was such a bad year for blueberries, not enough rain in July, and too much in June. Well, we’ll see, she said to her old aqua blueberry pail. We’ll see if our secret spot has any berries.

Mother, her daughters have said, leave a note when you go out for a walk in the woods, so people will know, at least, which woods you’re in, and she had said, who’d find the note? Nobody would miss me for days, and by then it’ll probably be too late, anyway. But Mother, you could sprain an ankle, or break an arm, climbing up those rugged hills—or fall over a log, or drown in a lake, anything could happen to you, and who’d know? I don’t know, she’d said; I’ll have to take the risk, and she remembered herself on the ridiculous bicycle again, learning how to ride a bike at fifty, imagine, when she’d taken the pickup out to Cliff’s Drive back of Negaunee, one lane paved in blacktop, and had put the bike in the back, so she could practice.

When she was young, she’d never learned how to ride a bike, and so she’d gotten on it, wobbling but going, finally going, and the blacktop was being eaten up in front of her eyes, peddling so fast as she was, and then there’d been the hill and the curve, going down that hill so fast, and the bicycle had gone right over the edge on the curve, and she’d tumbled down into the ditch, and got scratches and bruises, and a twig had pierced her right cheek, near her eye, so she was bleeding pretty much, too. This was before Norm died, and when she finally got home, the beat-up bike and the beat-up woman in that old clunker of a pick-up, he’d shrugged and asked her, just like the kids. Why do you go into the woods alone? Something is crazy about you.

Why indeed? Her thighs were brushing ferns now, a soft caress of bright green ferns, almost waist high in places, with soft honeydew grass, the slight click of stiff aspen leaves in the slender breeze, the smell of balsam, and her seasoned feet, sure on the foot-wide path.

 Down from the grove of birches and ferns, into a swamp, with black mud spongy, but not sinking wet, and the slap of high swamp bushes against her whole body, she performed her late summer ritual. She used her arms like a swimmer’s, to break through, the path faint but still there, winding a little to take advantage of the least-wet terrain, and the hum of mosquitoes came after her, as she stooped to tie her shoe, warning her to keep moving or they’d pounce, attracted to her sweating now, in this moist ravine. Then to another small bluff, scrambling up and across a large exposed granite rock face that slanted down into the swampy place she’d just left. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with her sleeve, drying her hands on her jeans, setting the blueberry pail down for a minute while she caught her breath.

Apple trees grew here on this mound, the fruit green and small yet; sour, too. Her mouth reverberated inside when she tried a bite: another few trips here in the fall, though, when they would be ripe and crisp, would give her enough apples for canning applesauce and apple butter for gifts; she’d need a new food mill this fall, because she’d lost the spring on the screw of the old one, and the man at the hardware store downtown said it was so old they couldn’t order a spare screw or spring. He said the new one would cost about $20.00, and she had to decide, is it worth it? Could she afford it, with heating prices the way they were, and the electric company just raising the rates again; she couldn’t afford to get new insulation for the drafty old house, either; paying the heating bills would be cheaper; for how long? But she wasn’t going to live many more years, she supposed, and she wanted to manage on what she had, even though The Company had cut down her pension. They cut widows’ benefits when the widows turn seventy. Well, maybe, she’d have to make applesauce the old way, peel the apples and core them, and mash them with the potato masher, white applesauce, even though the russet color of the food mill applesauce pleased her so, and was healthier. Well, it was a decision to be saved for later. For now, blueberries.

 Her eyes turned downward, ground bound, scanning the grade and the grasses and the bushes on this mound of rock and birch and apple trees, looking for a patch. There, on the reindeer moss, the small bushes she sought. Crouching, she saw the clusters of blueberries, tiny as a doll’s pearl necklace, and her practiced fingers went to work. The patch of bushes had so many berries, she finally had to just sit down, picking within her arms’ lengths, crushing the moss with her bottom, feeling the dampness filter through her jeans and underpants.

 The gathering of August, this was, performed by her grandmothers in Finland, and then here in this land, the women going out to gather the berries. When she was a girl, they’d all go out picking, her mother and her sisters and her aunts, and then the children had to clean them. She’d sat under a tree with a huge galvanized laundry tub full of blueberries, and she and Laina would have to pick out the leaves and the twigs and the raw berries, careful not to crush the ripe ones; they would start cleaning them in the afternoon, after everyone had picked since early morning, breaking through dew, and the cleaning lasted under that tree, until dark set in. Now her own daughters and granddaughters lived in cities with malls and freeways, and they couldn’t pick blueberries, nor clean them, but they could buy them at the supermarket, awful domestic berries that grew on high bushes and tasted like mush.

Her fingers worked in a plucking motion, gently, and she separated the ripe ones from the green ones by just the right amount of pressure, glad to have the use of her fingers still, for such delicate work; Norm’s mother had had arthritis near the end, and had been angry when she couldn’t pick the berries anymore; she saw the old woman, queenly in the middle of a burnt-over scrub pine sandy blueberry field, sitting in a patch and feeding blueberries to her youngest grandchild, chuckling at the greed of the blue-faced boy. Mumuu was dead now. Concentrating so much on the picking, she barely noticed when the sound of the berries dropping into the pail turned from the drumming plop, the quick dull sound of berries hitting the bottom of a pail, to the silence of the second and third layers, berries hitting berries.              

Four cups for a blueberry pie, one cup for blueberry muffins; she used to make her children pick one cup each, at least, when they’d go blueberry picking as a family, and she’d tell them that if they ate the berries they picked, no pie, no muffins; they had to save at least one cup each, and could eat the rest; they’d pick up their cups and then go to the car and beep the horn for her and Norm, impatient, just sitting in the car with the mosquitoes and black flies, beeping to the wilderness, while she and Norm continued to pick.

That was when the children had hated blueberry picking, the stage every child goes through until the picking becomes a happy annual ritual. She had disciplined herself to eat only a few, just to whet her taste, but it was harder for the children; her granddaughter, when they’d come here a few years ago to this secret patch, had eaten every last berry she’d picked—Grandma, they’re so good! She smiled and popped a few berries into her mouth, rolling them around on her tongue before biting. If she came out here enough times, maybe she’d have enough for canning; nothing like blueberries in the middle of the winter, as a side dish with the thin Finnish pancakes she made herself for Sunday breakfast, royal purple in the snow.

   Wandering from patch to patch, the next one under some cedar trees, the next in long grass where she could barely see the berries; and then there was the one in the cracks of the gray face of rock, and she sat on a crust of lichens, the pail half filled, enough for a batch of blueberry jam at least, even if she stopped picking now, which she wasn’t about to do. A full pail or nothing. She wondered what time it was, and looked at the sun, but it had turned cloudy without her noticing it, so intent had she been. She had no idea which direction the sun was in; everything in the sky was gray-white, and she couldn’t get a bearing on north or south, east or west.

She reached into her jacket pocket for the compass; never go into the woods without your compass, Mother, and a whistle, too, her son had said, and she had promised she wouldn’t. She saw exactly where her compass was: right on the kitchen table, right next to her whistle, right where she’d left it when she went to the bathroom before leaving. Well, no matter; she knew her way around here blindfolded, she’d been here so much, and only a couple of miles from home, if you cut through the woods near the lake instead of taking the trail. Lots of daylight left; it looked to be about four in the afternoon by the amount of light in the gray sky, though she couldn’t tell where the sun was. More patches of berries, and she wandered farther and farther, but closer to home, though, in an erratic semicircle. She had a feeling about these things.

In the middle of one patch, a black pile. Large and ploppy, sort of sausage shaped. Bear droppings? Human? She tried to remember what bear dropping looked like; she could only remember deer droppings, and rabbit, and fox. She shrugged, loosening her stiff shoulders, pausing from her picking to listen to the wind, to be quiet and receiving, to watch the chickadees on a nearby spruce as they scolded a squirrel. Sometimes the commotion of thought gets in the way of receptive observation.

She bent her head to avoid hitting a low branch, turned along a rock cut, and found herself in a wild raspberry patch. There is nothing so fragile as wild raspberries; the globules separated and fell into her palm, miniatures on an elf’s plate; she had to be even more deft than with the blueberries, in order to pick the raspberries whole, but her fingers soon remembered, and quickly loosened the berries from the stem, and now she had a layer of raspberries on top of the blueberries. A sugar plum tree had some ripe, reddish-purple fruit, also, and so she put a few sugar plums into the bucket too, but even more into her mouth. This feast of wild fruit, with a few chokecherries for cleaning her palate, and they wondered why she spent so much time in the woods? Her fingers were quite stained by now, red and deep purple, and she licked them and wiped them on her jeans.

They say you can smell a bear before you see him, that he smells like a horse barn.

Farther into the raspberry patch, more droppings and a long oval of trampled grass, as if a creature had slept here. She had been so quiet in her luxuriating over raspberry treasure, and the wind was blowing into her face, so her smell wasn’t that obvious.

She was not really surprised when she met him.

They were right about the smell; it was awful, worse than any horse barn. The creature was up on the rock face, about twenty-five feet away, and it looked as startled as she when their eyes met, and held. “Black bear, range northern United States and Canada, 5 feet tall, 300 pounds, can run as fast as 25 miles per hour; worshiped by ancient northern primitive tribes as a life-giver. A constellation in the sky was named after a great bear. Bears were taunted by cowards in the city square, caged and made to earn their living by dancing with chains around their ankles.”

Her mind snapped from reverie to fear and back again, as she stared unblinkingly at the dark brown bear with matted fur hung with thistles and burrs, and in her mind she saw him running across a slanted northern meadow in a fast lope, through birches and pines, crossing his territory; standing on the shore of a stream tipped on a large flat rock, waiting for trout; nosing into garbage cans and ripping tents; being captured and shot with tranquilizers and released in wilder wilderness by game wardens so it could recapture its former respect.

Motionless, their eyes held each other’s for—forever—and they were entranced as lovers who meet at the airport after not having seen each other for a long time. She stood still, as loosely poised as a dancer preparing for adagio, and then she swept her arm towards him slowly, hissing softly in the back of her teeth while he stood above her on the high precipice of gray rock, looking down at her from the angled perch, while she offered this ancient, primeval memory her aqua plastic bucket of berries. She was surprised to know that she was not afraid of him. Still hissing softly, she held his eyes and then set the bucket on a bed of moss; then she backed up slowly, still holding his eyes. When he turned and glided in a smooth gallop, up the rock face and away into the cedar stand, she almost wept. She had not meant to frighten him out of his place, but it was her place, also.

She waited, motionless, for a very long time, hoping he would come back and eat her berries. But he didn’t. Soon she wondered whether he had even ever really been here, or whether she had conjured him, imagined him from her need for company, whether she had summoned him by legerdemain, by her tribal deftness with berries.

The bucket seemed very heavy as she made her way in the direction she assumed was home; she had lost the place of the path. She who had been so blasé and confident, now stumbled and had to slide down steep hills, smashing through stands of ground pine undisturbed by bear or woman, and through swamps of cattails and through fields of blue harebells and into tansy that seemed to grab at her ankles with its stink that would bring an abortion to a girl who drank its tea. She felt tears.               

    She missed the bear. She wanted to touch him and comb his hair. Her daughter had called her up again last month and told her to get a pet, this show on tv said you shrivel up without touch, Mother, you need to touch and be touched, and she had been so blithe, hadn’t she? in replying, I touch the trees, I touch the grass, I touch the plants and the berries, as if her daughter’s suggestion were a joke. But now she knew it wasn’t and she longed for a bear. She was unable to find the path home. In one of the cedar swamps she plowed through, she saw a pile of dark feathers, raven feathers from their size, but no bird entrails. No bones, no guts. Just feathers, a bird caught by a fox or a skunk and eaten up, just like that.

She was beginning to plan to spend the night in the woods when, as it got almost dark, she finally recognized a familiar crook of maple tree, over on the next bluff, to her left. Yes, she had been on target again, her instinct for home, her internal compass, right again, a woman of the woods hypnotized by a bear. It was dark by the time she got home, and she looked up the bear in the encyclopedia and then almost forgot him out there in her woods, as she sat in her warm yellow kitchen, cleaning the berries, smelling the muffins that baked in her oven, listening to a clarinet concerto on the radio.

END