stood in the garden with Susan, clasping each other by the shoulders, and dug your feet down into the loose soil until they disappeared and you were people without feet. You were ankle people.
The soil, for its part, was warm.
We. Us. Ours. We were five in number.
Our mother. She would cut our hair in the kitchen. We would sit with an old sheet pinned around our necks and she would snip away.
“How old were you when you married Dad?” we would prompt.
“I was nineteen. A teenage bride,” she’d tell us again. We’d laugh. “We were so poor we ate a lot of pancakes for dinner.”
Pancakes for dinner did not sound like deprivation.
Our mother. Whereas our father came from the plains of western Missouri, from tall people who worked the soil and didn’t have much to say about that, our mother came from the Ozarks of southern Missouri, from people who hunted the woods and hollows and had stories that led to more stories that led to even more stories. The time the schoolteacher was sprayed by a skunk. The time the buggy tipped over. The time the roof caught on fire. The rattlesnake story, the snowstorm story, the first radio story. These stories trickled from our grandmother’s generation to our mother and then to us.
Our mother who was a social worker who helped children, but whose other job was us. She did magical things: feeding us, growing food for us, sewing for us, baking bread for us, taking us to dance lessons and piano lessons and softball games. We’d walk in the door after coming home from school and smell gingerbread.
Our mother who stood by her husband in all his years of graduate school, in a time when the wives of the students joked that while their husbands got PhDs, the wives got PHTs, which stood for “Putting Hubby Through.” She’d been a faculty wife. She’d had a baby in Connecticut, a baby in North Carolina, a baby in Ohio. Tenure was an elusive thing, so our mother and father decided to return to Missouri to raise their family.
There were the horses. There were the cows. There were the ducks and there were the chickens. The baby chicks hatched in June. You would wait and wait and all the hens were sitting on their eggs, and you knew exactly how many eggs they each had and you knew when they were supposed to hatch, and usually when they were supposed to hatch, they did. You could hear them in there—inside the egg!—peeping, just before they hatched. You would wait for all the eggs to hatch, and most of the time one or two eggs per batch didn’t hatch and the mother hen would leave the nest with her new family, and we would take the abandoned eggs inside, and Mom would wrap them in a little towel and put them in a metal bowl on top of the stove’s pilot light and sometimes—just sometimes—one of these eggs would hatch. Then you had probably saved its life. You and Susan and Mom. Plus the pilot light.
After breakfast, the first thing you did was go gather the eggs. Not the eggs with babies in them, but the new eggs. Eggs for eating. You carried a wicker basket and you went through the gate, brushing past the honeysuckle, and walked down the path to the chicken house. You let the chickens out—they were bunched at the door, waiting—and they fanned out across the yard and the mother hens were followed by the associations of puffs that were their babies. You went inside the chicken house and reached into the nesting boxes to get the new eggs. They were often warm from having been sat on. Sometimes you had to shoo an old hen off her nest so you could have her eggs. And sometimes you reached into a nest that was too high for you to see into and you felt an egg that was big and smooth and it wasn’t really an egg at all and you jumped backward because what you’d just touched was a snake, which was having a nap after a snack of eggs.
To get to the blackberry patch, at the back of the farm, sometimes we drove the pickup out there. Driving in the fields was a holiday of its own. The grass would brush the underside of the pickup. Or, if we didn’t drive, we walked out there. Talk about tall grass. To walk out there, you had to go through the big pasture by the north pond. That pasture had tall fescue grass you had to wade through. If you sat down, the horizon vanished, the trees on the edge of the field vanished. You could see just a few feet into the grass and you could see sky. That was all. You could flatten down the grass to make a little sitting area. You could make a path to another sitting area and have two sitting areas and a path. Of course, once the grass was cut for hay, there’d be no more of that kind of thing.
They were wild blackberries. Picking them was fun for about the first twelve berries, then it was work, but you were allowed to eat as many as you wanted. Fresh blackberries meant you got a cobbler for dinner. You could also put them on your cereal with honey. The second day, maybe we would crumble hot biscuits in bowls, then sprinkle them with berries, then add milk or cream, then add honey. It was almost the best thing a person could eat. There was no name for it, so when you wanted it you had to say the whole thing: “Biscuits with berries on them and then milk and honey in a bowl.” It was a breakfast or a dessert for lunch or dinner or a snack for night. That’s what it was. It was all of that.
Many of the blackberries were frozen in the freezer on the back porch. That way, in the middle of winter you might suddenly find a blackberry cobbler cooling on the counter and you would go instantly wiggly because of how lucky you were. The berries had traveled all the way from summer just to be something warm for you to eat on a cold, dark night. And who knew: you might have picked that berry right there. That exact berry . . .
The brambles would scratch you when you were picking berries. Like how a kitten scratches your arms, even though it doesn’t mean to. Also, there were ticks, chiggers, and poison ivy. The hazards of the blackberry patch. You never saw any snakes out there, but for some reason you were always told that there might be snakes. A watchful eye was required.
It felt like a long way from the house, even though you could look across the pastures and see the house on the hill, residing in the elm shade. Still, it felt like you were really out somewhere. You knew the creek was not too far away. You couldn’t hear any roads from there. If you looked up, maybe there was a jet making a line in the sky. Not that you could see the actual jet, just the line.
Black-eyed Susans. Daisies. Queen Anne’s lace.
Summer sun. Summer heat.
Berries and more berries.
July 5: five cups. July 7: eight cups. July 9: a gallon. On the 12th: seven quarts. On the 15th: seven gallons. July 18: another five and a half gallons. The last berries were on the 21st: three and a quarter gallons.
Fresh blackberries, frozen blackberries, home-canned blackberries. Jam, jelly, juice.
Before blackberry month, there were trips to pick strawberries at strawberry farms. For about three days you ate as many strawberries as humanly possible. The rest had to be cleaned, sliced, sugared, and frozen. Then there were trips to go pick blueberries. And then you ate as many of them as humanly possible. The rest had to be cleaned and frozen. Or canned. Canning happened at night because it was too hot to do during the day, and it helped a lot if Dad was home to pitch in. If everyone pitched in, it helped a lot.
The shadows slanted across the yard. The shadows slanted across the garden. A horsefly droned past, on his way to somewhere else. The barn swallows swooped and banked above the horse pasture. They spiraled, dove. Their forked tails.
One flew right between the legs of a horse. You saw it.
July also meant sweet corn. And sweet corn meant an electric fence, which you turned on at sunset and it made a clicking noise like a metronome. You could touch the wire between the clicks, but not during the click. The click was the electricity, which reminded you of the story of your uncle and how when he was a boy he had peed on a long stalk of grass
