In Robert McCloskey’s classic children’s book Blueberries for Sal, a bear and her cub and a woman and her daughter go berry-picking in the hills of Maine. The errant children, fond of the fruits beyond measure, eyes to the grounded shrubs, lose their mothers. Child and cub are shocked when their eyes upturn to unfamiliar faces—when the mother before them meets their gaze with fear and confusion. In that story, family is restored: the cub finds his sow, the child finds her mother’s skirt ripe for tugging. Loved ones reunite. The mother and her child return to their kitchen and make blueberry jam. They are young, and they are full of memories.
I too could tell you a story of blueberry fields forever, of the juices flowing like blood down my mother’s cheeks. She and I pick purple jewels on a gentle, warm New England hillside. Every breath joy, we are wild with delight.
In my story, we walk freely in a resilient northern forest—en-juiced in earthly bounty. I hold her arm and we clamber over sunbaked granite to a viewpoint of the Hoosic River valley. The blue! The green! she exclaims, wide-eyed over these upper reaches of the Hudson watershed. Colors overwhelm her consciousness these days—her attention to them smells psychedelic.
In that story, the pitch pines burned by a last spring’s fire—the largest in Massachusetts in decades—are regenerating already near the summit. The seeds from their serotinous cones, released only with sufficiently scorching temperatures, sprout from disturbed soils.
In that story, my mother’s mind is clear, articulate, and precise. She regales me with a tale of the first time she hiked Pine Cobble, this shoulder of Vermont’s Green Mountains that extends over the state border into my hometown. She was with dad, she tells me, in the ’80s, before their marital malaise and bitterness. Their friends Beth and Alex accompanied, and sandwiches at Papa Charlie’s Deli on Spring Street followed. I chuckle to imagine all of them as young, childless ramblers. We smile and stuff our cheeks with fruit like squirrels.
In that story, I relish reconciling with this woman who wounded me, relish the gift of knowing her as adult and peer. In that story, second-growth lushness, successional re-emergence, sprouts in the folds of her grey matter. We share a hug gazing out over winter’s purple hills turned green. She, like the forest, is renewed by the blaze that burns her over-growth. She has learned, in her restored spirit, to temper the devastation of the fires of her rage—to control her burns. In that story, the ecology of her mind heals.
But this is not that story.
In these last years of her dementia journey, my mom has developed an obsessive fondness for blueberries. Gallons of bags and teal, molded-pulp carts of them—fresh, frozen, and often rotting—line our freezer and fridge at all times. At the grocery store, I remind her that we have plenty at the house. Still, she wants more. Blueberries, blueberries, blueberries! she exclaims every morning with her ritual granola and yogurt.
Perhaps she loves them with such ardor for their antioxidants or their red leaves in autumn. Perhaps she loves them for their bee-teasing white bells in spring, or because they grow in disturbed places, in harsh soils, after fires. Or perhaps, in these ideas, I merely grasp incorrigibly for a poetics in grief, running my fingers through scorched earth looking for seeds.
When I ask her directly why she loves them so much, I find that we’re well past the point of pithy quotes for a son’s grief songs. Her words are simple and limited: I love the flavors. They’re so good. When I ask of her history with the fruits, whether she liked them as a kid, she cannot remember. She begins to weep.
I’m in trouble, Chris.
On my tenth birthday, in May, when lilacs bloom, my mom and I hiked up to the top of Pine Cobble with several of my friends. Vibrant and vital, she radiated joy in solidarity with the leafing forest of late spring. Her hair long and dark and her legs muscular, she swaggered then. We couldn’t pick berries that spring day, but perhaps we tickled the flowers. We hiked to the top of that hill many times in my youth, so I imagine that we must have once picked the fruits up there together at the height of one summer. I hope so.
And if I don’t remember it, might the mountain remember? If she doesn’t either, do the memories of berries scarfed trail-side linger in our cells somehow?
A confrontation with consciousness: I don’t remember most of my life in sensory detail. So often, I compose my narrative in attachments to received ideas, estimations of probabilities, and evasions of the unflattering rots. Is there a language of bodies and berries weaving stories in the soil below my everyday vocabulary? And how do I relate to beings whose tongues do not spell the tales I am accustomed to, whose stories lie outside of my mind and control?
I’m not sure whether my mother and I ever picked berries on that hillside, but I want to believe it’s true. And here you are, imagining it, so perhaps it is.
But nowadays, we cannot hike to the low-bush patches where the berries grow wild in the thin, acidic soils of the hilltop. My mom’s balance has waned, and she is losing weight. Her hair is thin and white. She often seems confused and disheveled. Alone, she would almost certainly lose her way. Days later, the Berkshire Eagle would report her body among the undergrowth and the pitch pines. Today, those wild mountaintop fruits elude her reach.
What we can do now is plant some bushes in the garden for her—the garden she can’t tend herself any longer. Imagine them now: three plump, prostrate shrubs, fruiting by July, between the terracotta flower plots and the snag of the old crab apple tree (itself now sending up resilient shoots, defying our amputations). The bushes root near the raised vegetable beds my cousin Steve and I put in last spring, built where there used to be a fire pit, and before that a sandbox. When we dug out the plots, rubber dinosaurs emerged from the soil, antediluvian remnants of the fantasy cities my sister and I once built in the sand. Now, a hopeful abundance of fruit and flower abides.
Many words have been penned on the gift of eating food directly from the garden you’ve grown. Here are mine—authentic, if not original: few spells nourish more delight. The pop of a single cherry tomato between the teeth in August redeems all the mudded labor in April.
So imagine now the sun-bleached mulch around the bases of these new bushes, and how quickly the birds pick the fruits before we can. Imagine the young woman lying beneath the flowering apple tree, belly full with me. Imagine the old woman ambling among the berries, soon to forget my identity. She pops a berry in her mouth, gazes out over the roses and daylilies, and smiles. The berry: a nonverbal pleasure, transcending time.
Memory lives in places. Who is responsible for tending them?
When she was young and able, my mom worked in the garden, and I helped—often reluctantly. As an adolescent, I was charged with expanding the borders of the backyard flower plots. She worked long days in the yards of others, and her own gardens sometimes ran wild. After years, her knobby hands bore nails with a permanent dirt patina. On my fridge, now, a picture of her, then: wide-brimmed sunhat above a roasted nose, hands protesting on hips, eyebrows raised suspiciously toward the camera (my always-errant dad). My mother, Betsy the Gardener: her broad and muscular shoulders support tanned forearms, her jaw tenses with resentment, and she lunges forward, warrior-like, in sturdy boots and thick, worn, rugged blue jeans. The photograph captures the flowering of an identity, an expression of our agricultural society condensed in a body in time, aching with anger and delight.
She has always been a tenacious person, my mom—a taskmaster with an exacting vision of every project’s plan. Whether she delegated chopping onions, peeling potatoes, or grinding spices, she always corrected any variations from her exact (and often unstated) expectations. My mom dominated the house, and particularly the gardens.
Now, as she battles her illness, her capacity to execute any plan or vision has deteriorated. Once manicured garden beds grow feral—a novel and expressive blend of the willed and the wild. A decade of dedicated floral plantings still bloom in summer, but persistent natives and invasives self-will their stories now in the interstices where attention and control have faded. In kin and kind, her mind itself comes to re-wild too. I witness this change in bone-deep grief, but also, sometimes, surprising joy. These days, her relationship to simple pleasure is unparalleled—she is overwhelmed by the beauty of flowers, of sunsets, of fruits. The pedantic armors of Latin names like vaccinium or other intellectual scaffolds for titrating feeling have melted off, disarming her heart. The blueberries are just good, after all. Why strain for meaning?
But I weep to see the books of botanical knowledge forgotten over the years, filling shelves in the kitchen. Now, she can barely say the word rose, let alone remember it.
When I dug out those plots in the backyard garden during my teen years, she frequently surveyed my work, scrutinizing each bend in the bean-like shape I was digging. Her tenacity, her will to control, was profound. Today, she grates against her losses in agency with the same fire. As she struggles to understand her own predicament, as her eyes wonder at colors and shapes I cannot see, as her hands tremble to buckle the seatbelt, the pain is hot and volatile.
What I want you to understand is that when I tried to plant blueberry bushes for my mom, she burned to dictate the process even as she couldn’t keep track of what day we had planned to go visit the nursery.
We’re going on Sunday?
No, Tuesday.
Monday?
No, Tuesday.
Tuesday.
Dialogue these days is rudimentary. Eye contact is critical. Clear mouth shapes are key.
But when the stakes are existential, as in matters of grief and blueberries, I’m not sure anyone cares what day it is. It’s just today.
And tomorrow it will be today, too.
When we acquire the bushes, determining the location of their planting tries my patience. We saunter about the yard—now, we want them here, now, we want them there; too much shade, too much sun; too close to the road, too far. We deliberate endlessly.
Understand that we is actually she, and that I am attempting to relinquish my need to know. I am trying to trust the process of honoring agency even as it diminishes, even as my not-yet demented mind simmers with frustration to witness this challenge with simple spatial decision-making.
Some days, we live in a Beckett play, waiting for a god that never comes. The apple tree waits, watches, decomposes. I place an old stone rabbit in the hollow of it, and she smiles. She tells me about the rabbit every time I visit for the next two years, always grinning at the secret. Then, eventually, she can’t see it anymore.
Eventually, she chooses the sunny side of the tree, on the south side of the house: there will lie a triangle of the blues, a small temple of sweetness in the domestic plot.
The days pass and get hotter. She still feels cold most days. What season is it? We need to get the bushes in the ground: a ticking clock.
Monday? Are the flavors good then?
Blueberries on Tuesday. Always good.
It’s easy to forget that for her, the satisfaction of making the decision might be more important than the bushes ever growing. I’m unsure if the shrubs wilting in their bags is a cost we’re willing to pay for her moment of retaining control. Eventually, my dad plants them on his own, and the deed is done. For a few days, she blisters at his takeover. Then, she is happy it’s done
Once the bushes are in the ground, I purchase mulch from the hardware store and shape three small beds around them. Immediately, she rages at the inorganic red dye. I am chastised. I infer the mulch, with its faux-cedar hue, is too suburban and domestic. Mostly, though, I am at a loss to comprehend her tastes when so few words remain to articulate them. I guess at what is too tame, too wild. Some days, she grieves her inability to map or name the species of flowers she planted so many years back. Some days, she delights in the brambly, exuberant unruliness of so many weeds and wildflowers unwinding her plans. Who decides, after all, what is a weed?
I find this confusion about wildness relatable: how much ought we to conform to the standards of a suffocating society?
But when my efforts at support are rejected by the terms of the inquiry, it’s a difficult pill to swallow. Haphazardly, she carries soil from the other beds to mix with my offensive mulch. She shouts at me, and unfortunately, I spit a few unkind words back. How was I to know? The line between the wild and the garden, between too much intervention or too little, feels increasingly fine. Can a feral mind belong here? How long can she remain? How long can I?
I water the bushes daily the summer that I return to my parents’ house. Though she feels cold in all seasons now, she’ll come outside if I am buzzing in the beds. She loves me; I love her. (Though I’m not always sure what these mean in more violent moments). The first rains wash away the offensive color. Juvenile grasses perk up around the edges. The bushes appear set in place, approach belonging. The mountaintop feels distant. Is this enough?
The shrubs will need fencing if we are to eat any of the berries before the birds, the squirrels, or the deer. Or that bear who drops by when winter breaks and spring melts into being, traipsing our gardens seeking trash and fruit. Trash and fruit, the ingredients of a well-made life.
As the new roots settle in, sometimes, chickadees graze on the shrubs. The hippocampus, or memory center, of a chickadee’s brain grows in the winter in times of scarce food, the better to remember every seed vault and berry bush. But in summer’s abundance, chickadees need little memory for managerial geo-location. When they land on the bushes, my mother smiles on the porch, a lightly euphoric glaze meditates into her eyes. I’m not sure it matters to her whether we enjoy the blueberries from the bushes all that much. What matters is that they’re there, that she can say still say the word, that she can appreciate the contrast between the blue and green. What matters is that summer is kind to her skin, that the world can hold memory even if we can’t. That care might live in the cycles of burning and reemergence. I want to believe that, at least. That some essence of goodness remains in the land, even as it is scarred. Perhaps that’s too mystical for you, though, and I can be okay with that.
What I can promise is this: while I can’t predict the exact rhythms of how this will end, I know there is still sweetness here to love.
CHRISTOPHER DENSMORE is an environmental essayist from Western Massachusetts. He earned a BA from Carleton College and an MFA in Creative and Environmental Writing from Eastern Oregon University, where he served as the editor of Oregon East. Having received support from the Fishtrap Gathering of Writers, the Orion Environmental Writing Workshop and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference, he is at work on a collection of essays on personal and ecological grief. Now living in Missoula, Christopher serves as a writing consultant for the University of Montana and sells books at Fact and Fiction.
