Photo by University of Delaware Carvel REC/Flickr
By Patrice Gopo
My youngest daughter tilts her head up at me as I buckle her into her car seat. She asks, “Can we go pick blueberries?”
I think, There is no blueberry season in Charlotte.
Her request comes just a week or two after our Charlotte strawberry-picking season. She recalls how I took her and her older sister to a farm flush with rows of low strawberry bushes. She tangled her fingers in the leaves and thin branches and found fruit the color of rubies. We later gathered around the kitchen table and lingered over strawberries rinsed in a colander. We discarded stems and mashed fresh fruit in our mouths. On the heels of the late-spring strawberry season and prior to the mid-summer descent of peach season and well before the tangy tart of apple season—when we leave Charlotte and drive two hours to the mountains for the day and pull ripe apples from a lush and giving orchard—my daughter says she wants blueberries.
“Too hot,” I tell her as I consider everything I’ve ever heard about blueberries, how they need cooler northern climates and mild summers. Charlotte is too hot in the summer for blueberries—and for me too if I consider the weight of the summer rays, the thick humidity that clenches the air, and the sweat beading around my hairline and dripping down my back. The air conditioner inside my home calls to me like a pied piper. I respond without protest.
“We need to go to Alaska,” I say to my girl. “We need to travel to a place with a real winter.” I think of Anchorage, where I come from, the city I left twenty years ago.
“Will we drive?” she asks me from the back seat as we join the traffic on familiar Charlotte roads and pass storefronts I’ve seen each day for six and a half years.
“Yes,” I tell her and catch her eye in the rearview mirror. “We’ll drive to Alaska, and we’ll pick blueberries.” Waves of my imagination roll over me, and I plan how we’ll drive days home to Alaska and fill our plastic pails with mounds of violet fruit. For the few moments I have the attention of a preschooler, together she and I dream. I plant a story of a long, winding road trip across the country, along the coast of Canada, and into Alaska, all in search of berries I think we can’t pick here in Charlotte.
This is my seventh summer in Charlotte. Six and a half years now in a city I thought might be a passing-through home. But my husband, my girls, and I, we are still here—beginning our seventh summer. Seven. The days of creation, the colors in a rainbow, the number of completion. Is seven also the number of years that signifies Charlotte is now the foundation for my family’s life?
Many summers ago, when I was a child in Alaska, my parents, my sister, and I collected pails of high-bush blueberries from first the slope of a mountain and then later the valley close by. We hiked into the hills near Anchorage and plucked the jewels that clung near tiny leaves, handfuls plopping in the bucket and at least as many more bursting in my mouth.
“Blueberry jam,” my mother declared, and she used a recipe a friend with extensive Alaskan roots had given our transplanted family. A recipe to boil the berries, stir in cups of granulated sugar and other ingredients I can’t recall. We set a row of jelly jars across the kitchen countertop and inhaled the fragrance of syrupy sweet. My mother poured the deep violet jam into each jar, and my sister and I helped tighten the lids. We used black permanent markers to write down the date and lined the pantry with jars of homemade blueberry jam. For the next few months whenever we wanted jam with warm slices of toast or paired with peanut butter sandwiches—perhaps all the way until that spring—we drew jars of jam from the pantry, unscrewed the lid, and remembered the slope of a mountain and the taste of fresh blueberries.
My mother is planning to leave my hometown of Anchorage and move to my Charlotte neighborhood. My father left when my parents’ marriage ended years ago, but my mother stayed and has remained now for forty-three winters of navigating ice-caked roads. And forty-three summers in mild weather offering just enough respite from the snow. My mother wants to be near her granddaughters. She wants them to come spend weekends with her and visit her on sweltering summer days. My mother has never spent a full summer in Charlotte, but soon she will. Sometimes in the midst of the Charlotte summer, when the heat bears down with an even greater intensity, I think of my Anchorage mountains. I think of temperatures ten, twenty, thirty degrees cooler. I think of days perfect for the flourishing of wild Alaskan blueberries—and overcast heavens spilling forth the crisp comfort of home.
•••
On the phone, on an ordinary day this summer, my mother tells me that she will put her house on the market in autumn, that she will pack her possessions, leave Alaska, and create a home down the road from me in Charlotte. The distance between my family and her will compress to mere streets, to a number of houses between, no longer the stuff of a thousand miles thrice over. I know these happenings usher in a time of the beauty of generations entwined, but I taste a slight bitterness in my mouth and the words slow.
“Wow. It’s sad,” I say when I think of her home sold and the way I’ll no longer be able to tell people my mother lives in Alaska.
My mother echoes my words. “It is sad,” she replies and there is a long pause in our conversation.
My daughters play down the road at a summer camp, running around a playground, sucking on ice popsicles, and living the lazy days as I once did far away in Anchorage. I stand in my garage, preparing to leave to go pick them up from a day of fun. My mother is coming to us. Next year she may be preparing to go pick up her granddaughters from a day at camp, bring them back to her house, and watch them create imaginary games at the edge of the woods in her new back yard. As I drive the couple of miles down the road, I recall my mother’s back deck and the mountains the color of blueberries in the distance and the way we were living like Alaska would always be home. I have gorged myself on the reality of a life rooted somewhere. Even as I’ve left Alaska, my mother’s presence there allows me to taste these ties to a familiar place. And with my mother’s words, with the few months left, I find the flavor I long to hold beginning to evaporate into nothing but memories.
I pull into the camp parking lot and pause a moment to glance at the height of the surrounding trees and the expanse of the manicured lawn. The months ahead will bring with it laughter and long hugs, shared meals and creation of the future—something new to alleviate the weight of the loss of my childhood home pressing against my chest but perhaps never dissipating.
•••
Days after I speak with my mother, my family and I spend a Saturday a few hours from Charlotte. We pass the afternoon on a farm on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, sipping cold drinks, seated on stools in an open-air tea house void of walls, windows, and doors. In each direction we turn, we spy plants and shrubs used in this eco-friendly business. Lavender and jasmine. Hyssop and hibiscus too. A couple of hummingbirds hover near a clump of leaves, their wings a blur. Bees buzz around, and I envision raw honey sold in canning jars. When I purchase my glass of lavender lemonade, I spot a sign that reads, PICK BLUEBERRIES HERE.
Blueberries? Here on this plot of land lit with summer heat, never knowing the chill of real winter cold? The girls and I wander past picnic benches and a makeshift playground to rows and rows and rows of blueberry bushes. We pluck the berries and begin to fill a quart-size crate to brimming, working steadily in the shade of a few trees, stripping each bush of its bounty. My girls want to move further down the row, but I keep us in the shade, the brute sun sure to transform the fun of berry picking into absolute drudgery. After we fill our quart and before we wander back to the tea house replete with spinning fans and cups of ice water, I take a photo of my youngest holding the cardboard container of berries. We stand not on the slope of a mountain, but instead on this flat patch of ground beneath a grove of trees.
“We didn’t have to drive all the way to Alaska,” I tell my daughter as she poses with her blueish-purple treasure. Here, just a few hours from our home, the blueberries grow in quantity enough to satiate and satisfy.
•••
PATRICE GOPO is a 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Literature Fellow. She is the author of All the Colors We Will See: Reflections on Barriers, Brokenness, and Finding Our Way (August 2018), an essay collection about race, immigration, and belonging. She lives with her family in North Carolina.
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