Blueberry Fool

Memory, Moments, and Meaning

Thom Rock

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781610974486
  9781498260732
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630875695
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Is it possible to find the revelatory, to find faith in a tiny blue berry? This is but one of the questions explored in this collection of engaging essays aimed at the intrinsically human intersection of memory and belief. Threaded throughout with an ever-changing cast of meadowland characters, not the least of which is a rambling barren of wild blueberries, these writings offer an intimate chronicle of one man's quest to understand what it means to believe. Again and again the author's words bring the reader from a particular geographical place to a location at once familiar and foreign, universal and unique: the landscape of memory. Whether grappling with the implications of adoption, or grieving over a lost family recipe; recalling a surprise encounter with an equally surprised red fox, or reconsidering the meaning of migration, Blueberry Fool is about the sheer fragility and strength of belief, the idiosyncratic light of memory, and the simple year-round pleasures of a wild meadow.

Now and Then

The berries ripen in such abundance; I bow and bend in their presence. Having quickly learned the harvesting work my fingers do so all on their own, leaving my mind to wander. And where it wanders to most often is memory. One moment I am aware of the summer sun on my back, my hands working away in the tangle of berry, leaf, and twig. The next: a flock of memories have ghosted their way into the meadow. Whether or not the repetitive motions and the sound of berries falling into bucket influence this phenomenon I do not know. But when I am out there in the meadow filling a tin pail with those indigo gems, time ceases to march in an orderly fashion, sometimes standing still, but more often than not sliding backwards in a moonwalk of memory. Moments from time appear unbidden and as mysterious as question marks interwoven amongst the grasses and goldenrods. I find myself in the past, or at least in the company of those who inhabit it. Do I somehow transport myself to them, I wonder, or is it they who come to me?

Our lives are made of moments in time. And, at the same time, everything is memory save for that slimmest slip of time that just now slipped by. Yet we order our lives around the façade of the calendar, the upswing of the pendulum, the accuracy and endurance of memory. We separate past and present as if they were opposing notions. We feebly attempt to mark and measure our days regardless of whether they stretch out lazily in the long summer sun or curl up tight under winter’s equally long night. They pile up behind us: a handful of years, a thousand moons, until eventually time seems to fly and moments appear to pass by more quickly. You reach beneath a berry branch one morning and find not your own fingers stretching out for the blue from the cuff of your sleeve but those of your father’s work-worn hands.

In those moments I am no longer in this northern meadow but seated at the old oak table at a family reunion; my mother setting the table with her mother’s favorite china painted with tiny blue forget-me-nots, my sister and I arguing over which of us should get to sit on the high wooden stool, its rickety legs bound and reinforced with baling wire. Or I’m walking up the dirt road with my family one long-ago evening catching fireflies with my sister. Or I catch a glimpse through the sweet steam of my mother laughing with her brothers, maple sap boiling wildly before them in the broad, flat metal pan in the middle of the sugarhouse, in the middle of the woods.

There have indeed been times in this time-lost meadow when I have plucked a particularly sweet memory from these berry bushes and held it wonderingly in my palm, not ever wanting to let it go. But memory, like time, is always moving, even when we’d rather stand still. I know I cannot inhabit the past, or at least if I choose to do so exclusively I run the risk of missing out on those moments that might, in turn, become my future memories. Or in other words: my life. But holding on to a memory is not the same as inhabiting the past, and a vivid moment can return us to its illuminating source if only for a moment.

And yet those sweet moments seem to spring up suddenly and apart from no obvious pattern. With no clear warning a memory might swell, blossom, and bear fruit in the blueberry barren. The wind teasing the tall grasses just so, a certain breath of air, or the sound of travelling geese journeying high above . . . and suddenly I am inexplicably somewhere else, in a place and time that no longer is. Not exactly a then-and-there but a then-again. A long-lost summer afternoon, a rope swing swung over an arcing branch. An iconic image that appears frozen in time, like an unsuspecting fly stuck in amber. Yet these fragments of memory are fleeting: despite their crystalline cells, they still hum and whir. They can even take flight.

Which is it, then: is memory moving or static? Is it a fossilized jewel kept inside some velvet-lined treasure box to be taken out at will and admired? Or might it be something equally delicate but surely winged, an ever-evolving insect capable of metamorphosis and migration? Either way, I’d like to believe these moments will never fade away, but memory also has a trick up its sleeve: it can disappear in the wink of an eye. So I line the fluttering memories up across the page syllable after syllable to make of them something indelible. Something to believe in.

Even if memory is a time-traveler, a shapeshifter, it is what I believe in. What we remember and how we remember it shapes the story of our lives, of who we are. When we call forth moments from our individual journeys, or when they arrive unbidden, we cannot help attaching to them meaning and definition. The past becomes present in the present as well as the future: we become our memories.

I believe in memory because at the sight of a single firefly it carries me, in a flash, over and through time to a long-ago velvet night. I believe in memory because I have felt in the meadow, as real and present as if I were a child again, my own mother’s hand pressed upon my chest. I believe in memory because I also believe that death is not the end of our story. That the story of everyone I have ever loved continues, their story and mine, beyond what we presume to be “the end.” Admittedly, I am uneasy stating this belief; I am not entirely comfortable defining myself as a person of belief, of faith. What are the implications of saying, for example, that I believe love lives on, that we live on? Am I automatically embracing a belief that heaven exists and is where my beloveds abide? I’m not really sure. Nor can I state with unwavering trust that I believe in the power of prayer. Yet if I do not recognize the moments from time that appear to me in the meadow as just that—as grace-filled prayers—well, the alternative is disconcerting at the very least. If faith equals certainty, I am undoubtedly uneasy, for I cannot grasp how I might ever prove how meaningfully I have experienced memory amidst a hillside of wild blueberries.

Still, I cannot imagine myself saying, “I do not believe.”

Borderlands

The summer fields are painted ochre and saffron. The goldenrod seem to know instinctively just when to stretch their willowy limbs and unfurl their blazing petals all on their own. Black-eyed Susans accompany the golden spires in some places, while in others oxeye daisies keep watch. The embers of fireweed glimmer here and there and the sweet globes of milkweed flowers are luring insects small and large to their fragrant world. The wild blueberries are coming in, ripening not from cultivation or savvy hybridization, but from something in the summer air: birdsong, perhaps. At least that’s what I think as I squat in the lower field picking the tiny indigo bubbles from the low-growing plants.

I walk upright to this wild place. My nifty opposable thumbs make berry picking a snap. But other than my harvesting presence I am not a factor in this meadowland; I have neither planted nor tended these bushes. The berries I drop into the basket exist entirely due to the bees that pollinated the waxy white flowers earlier in the spring. I am an outsider here, a visitor in this miraculous, blue world. I neither speak the blueberry tongue nor know the lapis language of bee and flower. An entire insect world clicks and whirs invisibly in the grasses that weave in and out of this blue treasure trove. The morning chorus of birds slides elemental over the spruce trees. I imagine in the sweet gibberish of their song a joyful hymn offered at the resurrection of daylight, but who knows, maybe their melodious notes are merely orders, something as simple and mundane as today’s to-do list?

The other night I awoke to eerie, wild words that left me feeling unsettled and disoriented. So foreign to me was their language that I could not even assure myself, “Only a fox barking, or the screech of owl.” What creature should speak such syllables to the stars? I wondered. Haunting sounds, they bounced off the shouldering slopes of the mountain and into the valley all through the night as the world I thought I knew grew less and less familiar. In the morning, I could find no evidence remaining with which to piece together the nocturnal drama that had unfolded. Dew sparkled brightly off the tips of the meadow grass. The air seemed fresh and innocent, and breathed not a whisper of whatever had transpired in the night. I found myself wondering how many worlds I may have slept through in my life, how many worlds remain invisible to me.

I often find proof of other worlds along the path to the berries: a lifeless vole, its fur wet and licked into an unnatural direction. Or, nearest to the blueberry meadow, another sign: an imprint in the moist earth where midnight hooves sank deep into the mud. Once, a seemingly intact butterfly, its stilled wings stopped mid-beat. What world had it fallen from, I wondered, and what had it risked? What about the snake that skids across the path from one grassy galaxy to the next? Or the watchful world of the deer who grazes by the hedgerow and, when it spots you, bounds away clumsily, with an odd gait? Or the milkweed universe with its flower planets and insect moons, its caterpillar stars that spin and burn until they turn themselves inside out in a supernova of orange wings that flash and flicker all across the great sweep of the meadow?

So many worlds.

Even amongst my own species I find there are places I simply do not know. Yesterday, at the soup kitchen, I sat with a man my own age for whom hunger was his homeland, a place I’ve never even visited. Another ambassador at the table believed he was a prophet, that he was Saint Paul. His sentences contained familiar words, but I could make no sense of them. All I could do was wonder at his world, offer him another bowl of soup, and feel grateful I do not know the dialect of empty stomach or hear the fiery tongues of hallucination.

The more I pull myself from slumber, the more I realize that the world I know is really a world I think I know, that there are boundless realms bouncing against each other continuously. We might get a glimpse into another world when its orbit intersects ours. And who knows how long such meteors might have been traveling to reach us? Ancient photons of distant stars travel millions of years—and through galaxies—before their glimmering light alights upon our cheeks. This celestial phenomenon occurs every moment of the day, whether we are wide-awake or fast asleep. If we’re lucky, we might catch the tinsel and flicker of the morning star and feel like something more than the sun rises with the dawn: a chance to see and do things in a new way.

This morning, hiking back with my cache of wild berries, I came around the corner in the path at the same time as a red fox traveling in the opposite direction. Perhaps it too had berry picking in mind, but seeing me, skidded to a stop. For a brief moment we both froze, the borders of our worlds overlapping in the margin. Having come face-to-face so unexpectedly, neither one of us knew quite what to do. Then the elegant creature retreated to a granite outcropping where it sat looking out over the meadow. The tips of his tawny fur glinted in the morning sunlight, creating a glowing halo effect around his shimmering body. If I had known any russet words of fox I would have spoken them, whispered into his whispery ears, “You are a magnificently beautiful being.” But all I could do was wonder at his world as I stood still as stone in the amber glow of foxlight. Indeed, though for the moment my world revolved around his, the fox’s fiery red planet spun quietly back out into space as he heard something rustle in the bracken.

His black stockinged paws stepped once, twice into the tall ferns, and he was gone.

Making Hay

Only a few days ago the wind rippled over the tops of the grasses, the wispy globes of dandelion and the buttercups, painting great sweeping patterns in the field. But now a more structured design emerges. The stems and leaves and flowers lie in concentric rows that follow the contours of the land, revealing the curvaceous earth from which they sprang. It’s the first cut of the season, and everywhere you go this week you can hear the hum and whir of tractors bouncing through hay fields. One day the machines pull the wide-mouthed cutting blade behind their tall wheels; the giant twirling prongs of the hay rake dance behind them the next. The bailers and trucks, with t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• The Gospel according to Blueberry
• Chapter 1: Now and Then
• Chapter 2: Borderlands
• Chapter 3: Making Hay
• Chapter 4: Preservation
• Chapter 5: Hark
• Chapter 6: Was, Is, Will Be . . .
• Chapter 7: Blue Moon
• Chapter 8: How I Wonder What You Are
• Chapter 9: Forgetting Fireflies
• Chapter 10: On the Way
• Chapter 11: Bee Leaving
• Chapter 12: Before and After
• Chapter 13: If Heaven Is
• Chapter 14: Blueberry Fool