PICKING BLACKBERRIES IN BELLINGHAM You wear a long sleeved shirt -- thorns grab and tear when you plunge your arm into the thicket to find overlooked fat ones. Bushes mass along the creek and road, and the neighborhood knows the season’s plenty for pies and snacks. You thrust two arms in, hold one branch back, find four or five berries in a bunch to pick with the other hand and drop in one of two buckets. Your fingers are stained, and you eat as you’re picking, tongue and lips juiced. Truckers on the road to the waterfront honk and wave, remembering pies and blackberry picking with aunts and mothers. In this creek where salmon run late in summer, a Kingfisher chatters at you for coming too close to her nest. Her blue and white feathers are a frantic flash above the water as she scolds “tch tch tch tch” and darts away to fool you. Spraddled across frail branches of a gone-to-wild cherry tree a young raccoon, all face mask and pointy nose, keeps one eye on you, one eye on the cherries he’s eating. Carry the loaded buckets back to the house thinking of the first time you picked blackberries under the hot Missouri summer sun. Your sister and you and Aunt Kitty gorged yourselves and picked fruit prickly and plump, going home scratched and happy to watch her make pies with flaky crusts laced with lard, latticed tops bubbling purple as they came out of the oven. Your son’s wife pinches pie crust edges into ruffles as the two of you conjure sisters, aunts, mothers.
THE WALKING-ON-THE-MOON POLKA There’s little else in the house than the thin mattress on Aunt Helen’s narrow hundred-year-old bedsprings that creak and groan when one of us breathes. My husband is dreaming, calling aloud, waving his arms to stop whatever is coming. I want to stop it, too, but I can’t sleep. In fields reaching horizons new emerald wheat springs. Pale lacy leaves are starting. Red sandstone gates still mark Mother Bickerdyke’s Nursing Home for Civil War veterans and nurses. Thinking of her path to this day and place as we help her move to Prairie West Assisted Living, she speaks of riding with her father far away on a wagon pulled by horses to sell a load of hay. They bedded at night in a barn with the team, returning home the next day. She remembers driving her Model T, changing flat tires on dirt roads north as far as Cuba, Kansas – anything to get to a Czech dance. In her dreams, she still swings to the Lamplighter Waltz and the Walking-on-the-Moon Polka.
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