Picking berries, sharing wonders in a muted woodland

This summer, Manitoba suffered prolonged periods of extreme weather. While eager to pick berries with my grandson, as is our habit, the temperatures were forbidding.

My grandson, 5, remained intrepid. As I am the one who charmed him into becoming a picker, I must be equally so.

When he is ready (and that depends on many factors, all of which are out of my control), he points to the blue bucket and the side porch door. It’s time. The time might be high noon (and often it is) when the sun is at its peak and my cellphone tells me the temperature is a 35 C that “feels like” 44.

There is always the line —“only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” — I reference as we set out. To begin, of course, there is the snack, the hat, the water bottle, the bucket, the bug spray, sneakers, socks (ticks) and the cell.

Our foray starts with Blueberry Mountain to the right (a bit of an incline that suggests the idea of a hill) and Raspberry Mountain to the left (bushes that climb up and around an elevated holding tank.) We have also expanded our territory into secret places further afield.

The heat is brutal. I’m sweat-drenched within the first five minutes, but my little companion is not. He is mesmerized. I want him to achieve his heart’s desire. I want to achieve my own. I would never recommend returning to the cottage.

We take sips of water as required. He hands me his hat. I understand. I don’t much like to wear one either. I don’t argue. It is too hot and there is energy to be saved for the bending and reaching. Sometimes we find a rock we can sit on in the midst of a patch. Sometimes the blueberries are plump, almost periwinkle in colour, in clumps, and we slide them off the stems and into the bucket, amazed. Always we are amazed.

Thankfulness. We share that together. We thank the berries and the bushes, the trees that provide some cover. We wonder at how many we might have picked. Enough for a buckle? A crisp?

If we see a bee, we exclaim. So too if there is a cabbage white or a viceroy butterfly. And we know there are fewer and fewer of them. I know it more fully than this little boy because I remember the hum of bugs in the not-too-hot sun, the delicate dance of butterflies partnering milkweed, pot-bellied bees drunk inside mallow, caterpillars, grasshoppers and royal blue dragonflies exploring my picking finger.

There is so little of that glorious commotion left in the forest. While thrilled to be with my grandson, I quietly lament that the wild woods I knew — bird and bug song rustling round leaves and branch bits — are almost mute.

I have read about men and women my age marching on behalf of butterflies and bees, protesting the climate catastrophe spawned by greed and indifference. I don’t tell my grandson that humans are, by and large, a menace. He will come to understand that as up he grows in a world less green, despoiled.

I don’t want him to come to that understanding. I want the return of the robust woodland life I marvelled at in my childhood. I want this gift to companion throughout his lifetime. I want him to hold the hand of his own child, should he have one, within the buzz and the beauty of berries blossoming and bellied bees, languid wind-wafted summer days, and temperate, cloud-kissed blueberry skies.

I am trying to give him what my grandfather gave me when I was a little girl and he introduced me to a strawberry patch beside a sweating water tank, my toes tickling stiff, sun-dried grasses where strawberries flourished, my heel kneading the fine grey-brown dirt my mother daily swept into piles on a linoleum floor whose pattern had long since departed.

My grandson and I pick delicately and leave berries behind for those who might come after. We are aware of the circle of the seasons, life cycles, our own devotion as pickers sweat-drenched and bug-sprayed. We carry our bucket home. Spent, I throw all of my 76 years gratefully onto the couch; he races round showing off our bucket-berry bounty.

If he should take my hand and point to the bucket and the porch door tomorrow, I will be by his side, nourished by our shared belief in nature and the gifts I hope endure to greet him.

arts@freepress.mb.ca