The sun broke through a moment ago, shining through the last wispy bits of foggy gauze that have been hanging around the inlet this morning. The doors are open and first vestiges of fall weather are coursing their way through the rooms of my house. The Asian pear tree is shifting it's colour alliance and the blueberries are about to do the same. I see the unavoidable signs of autumn on the wing and I am rejoicing. The hardest summer of my life, bar none, is almost behind me, and I am glad.
I am happy for the reduced thicket of blackberries the neighbors maintain. It is only across the border of our yards and it has far more berries on it than they'll every use. I see their kids out there with bowls and such, fetching berries around dinner time. Do they make crumbles? Brown Betties? Pies? I have no idea since we never exchange recipes but I will go out there this morning, pad my way barefoot across the dewey grass and fill a bowl full of those glistening, overripe jewels. I love how they tear away in my fingers, some too sodden with juice to hold it together long enough to become my cereal topping. The season is late for berries and the weather has been too damp to help them carry along until deep September. It really is a now or never kind of moment. I think I'll go out picking this weekend just to fill the freezer with a pie or two's worth of sunshine for Thanksgiving.
In thinking that I am saying that I will possibly be here for Thanksgiving. I said that to Mi Novia last night after she dropped by. She said that that was putting negative energy, a wall, in front of my desire to be close to the kids. That by saying that I would somehow create a barrier between me and some interested buyers. Somehow by generating a back-up plan I was generating ill will between me and the cosmos, somehow influencing the ways and means of securing employment in Idaho. Funny, but I don't see it that way. I look at those simple words as the beginning of a fall-back plan, a sort of staged retreat back into the Puget Sound region and the walls of this house. I must be real, and picking berries for the fall is just part of that.
There is a pretty black bowl, Japanese, good for soup, that I will use this morning for gathering berries. It is not as pretty as the white cup I once found for you, the one that was decorated with blue flowers. I passed that along to you late in our season, late as in August, right before you left the library. It wasn't the day of the Cruz, the day you told me that you felt as if you lost your right arm. It wasn't the weekend that you made lumpia out in Brownsville, because that weekend I went to the Dungness Spit with the kids. No, it was a random Sunday, close to the end but not so close that you were worried about me being there. Maybe I didn't even see you. I had access to your locker, and thinking about it I believe I just left them there for you to enjoy on your break.
We had a long history of berries and giving and sharing. I think, though, that in sharing these words here I have taken those words, our times, our experiences and put them out there, have placed them in an arena that, if you were to know that others were reading them, might make you uncomfortable. I never really thought about that as I left this trail of words here for you. I never thought about anything other my joy in sharing with the world something I thought was pretty wonderful. I know that the world was pretty tuned into us, that they saw us and thought, "wow, there goes one shining couple" but they were not tuned into our internal frequency, not privy to the sweet joys that only insiders would know about. Stumbling upon this space would open that secret Eden of ours up and let the world in.
I wish I knew how you felt about it all.
Someday, though, there will be something to come out of this. Autobiographical fiction? A novel? Some sort of tricky multimedia device that mimics a blog and all it's interesting possibilities? Why have I continued to do this? Only because the flames of our times still burn hot.
I have been following the news down in LA, the headlines about the Station fire, how it grows every night, how it seems uncontainable, least ways, for the moment. I think of that fire and how it just keeps rolling along, finding niches to hide in and canyons to roam in and fuel to burn, and how it continues to be so hot after so many days of burning. I think of that fire, it's relentlessness and understand it completely. I know that fire, know that unquenchable flame, intimately relate to how it burns unceasingly as it courses it way through my heart and soul and belly. It never goes away, that fire, hence these words. They are way of corraling that conflageration, a way of hosing down some of the heat in order to live a somewhat normal life.
We shared berries years ago, fed them to each other, secreted them away in lockers, shared them in clafouties, all that. These words are like that, too. They are ripe, in the the height of their season. Maybe in a few years the heat won't be there, the dampness of time will cool the ardour, maybe they will wither or go bad on the vine, be ignored. Maybe the ubiquiteousness of them, that they are all around, never ending, perennial in their return, will make them bland, boring, easy to ignore. All the same they are there, finding their way to the surface, to a medium where they can be explored, shared, savored. To a place where they hopefully reach you.
If these words bother you, here or in any way, let me know, and I will find a way to write and put them away in the satchel without bringing in the world to celebrate our love. If they have hurt you in any way, forgive me, for I have only done it out of love. Our love, like those berries I placed in a cup in your locker, had a season. These words here, like my gathering of berries to place in the freezer for later on this year, is to preserve those times. When that pie is served up this Thanksgiving it will be like summer time all over again. Reading these missives, I pray, will help bring that summer of our love back to your heart once again.
Love, your WHMB
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