Squished berries and silly stories make a house a home
We went to pick strawberries
an hour after we got home from Minnesota, even though the van
was still stuffed to the rafters with the old pie safe and
Grandpa Adam’s little table and the Formica cutting board shaped
like a pig that my uncle once made for Mom.
As we rolled heavily down
Interstate 84, with Mount Hood ahead, more than 20 hours of
driving behind us and our son Steven nonchalantly at the wheel,
my husband called our friend TJ of Bear Fruit to see if the
berries were still available.
“My wife is desperate,” he said.
“We’ve been in Minnesota for her dad’s sale, and she’s afraid
she’s going to miss out on the strawberries.”
Paul got off the phone. “They
still have plenty. They’re not as big, but we can still get
them.”
Yes!
We turned into the driveway at
3:30 p.m., cleaned up a bit, looked at the mail, and drove to
the patch, where TJ’s wife Marcia gave us buckets and directed
us to the pink flags.
Green leaves pushed aside, bright
red berries underneath, sun shining, dirt under my knees, family
near me. The first bite was a taste of heaven.
Everything was going to be all
right.
In Minnesota, strawberries ripen
at the end of June, and when I was a child, the nearest U-pick
patch was almost an hour away. Once a year, we would rise early,
Mom and my two sisters and me, and load the car with ice cream
buckets and huge stainless steel bowls.
The routine never varied.
First we picked with
excitement, tasting frequently.
Then we picked fast,
marveling at the clusters of red down under the overhanging
green.
Hours passed and buckets
filled. Mom picked steadily, crouching down in her worn dress
and apron, with a bandana on her head.
We girls inevitably started
throwing rotten berries at each other, giggling about the people
in the next row and eating far too many berries without
considering their high moisture content.
We talked with other pickers
about the quality of the berries and the weather, and also about
us, since this was far enough from home that people weren’t used
to our “plain” appearance.
“Are you sisters?” an older
woman in the next row once asked Rebecca and me.
“Yes, we are.”
“What order are you with?”
“Order?”
A confused conversation
followed until we figured out that she meant Catholic nuns, and
we meant female siblings.
By the time Mom finally
decided we had picked enough, the sun was high and hot, we were
dirty and tired and hungry, and our fingers were stained red.
We trekked down the long rows
carrying our overflowing buckets, which we piled on the table in
front of the little shed. While the cashier weighed and Mom
paid, we girls dashed to the nearby PortaPotty and danced
desperately as we waited in line, the same urgency, due to the
same indulgence, having afflicted many of the pickers at once.
We drove home with the windows
open and knew that our work was far from finished.
After a quick lunch, we sat
around the kitchen table and stemmed berries for the rest of the
day. Mom washed and cut and sugared. We scooped them into square
containers for the freezer.
By late afternoon our fingers
ached and we were tired of strawberries. Descending into
silliness, we laughed crazily at things that weren’t that funny.
We had quit eating berries.
I recall dropping an overripe
berry down Rebecca’s back once, and squishing it flat.
And then, finally, we were
finished. Stacks of containers carried to the freezer, clanking
bowls sloshed in the sink, stems tossed to the pigs, and then we
could scatter to relax and read a book or go outside to sit
under a tree and just breathe.
Selling your parents’
belongings, moving your dad into your brother’s basement
apartment next door, and saying goodbye to the home place is
like a berry-picking day on a much larger scale.
We assembled the family, dove
in with enthusiasm, worked impossibly hard, descended into
silliness, exhausted ourselves beyond bearing, and were so sick
of the stuff at hand — in this case, old papers and glass jars
and Cool Whip containers — that we never wanted to see them
again.
Mom and Dad sold their farm in
1984, the summer Paul and I got married, and moved onto a 5-acre
property half a mile up the road. Sadly, the house and many
heirlooms burned down in 1987, but they rebuilt on the same
site.
So for 30 years of our
marriage, that was the place we went home to.
From Highway 4 we would turn
onto the dirt road. A mile west and the road stopped in a T with
another gravel road, but we would continue straight ahead, down
the long driveway with neighbor Olaf Johnson’s crops on the
left, around the awkward uphill curve, and then we were there:
red barn with goats and cats and a pig or steer, the shed with
the old Farmall tractor, and the white house with Mom rushing
out to hug us.
We had big Christmas dinners
there, and birthday parties, and lots of coffee. We came with
our babies and Mom took care of both them and us, insisting that
we needed a break. She made Popsicles for the grandchildren that
they ate on the deck on summer evenings. She cut fresh lettuce
from the garden and showed us all her latest quilts.
None of us liked to sleep in
the basement bedroom under the kitchen because Dad was always up
before 6 a.m., marching back and forth across the kitchen in his
hard-soled shoes, fixing his oatmeal with its secret added
ingredients and brewing his mysterious hot drink that kept him
healthy for these 97 years.
Did it really take that many
trips across the kitchen to accomplish this, we wondered,
stuffing our heads under pillows and feeling like the troll
under the bridge, with Papa Billy Goat Gruff trip-trapping over
our heads.
Dad’s morning routine never
changed, but other things did. The corners got dirty and the
basement smelled funny and dark things accumulated in the
garage.
When we came home, we took
care of Mom instead of she taking care of us.
Mom and Dad were determined to
stay in the house, and fully independent, until they died. We
all worked together to make it possible, and they stayed until
Mom broke another hip and was overcome by dementia.
She passed away last December.
Dad realized that the heart and life of the house was gone and
said he was ready to sell and move out.
So we came from Oregon,
Oklahoma, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. From Turkey and
Yemen and Canada.
We dug and sorted and washed
and boxed and recycled and threw away.
We told stories and laughed
until tears ran down our cheeks, especially when Anna the
sister-in-law described the frightening experience of coming
upon Dad suited up all Darth Vader-like to spray his apple
trees.
And when Rebecca found the old
enema apparatus that Mom, having trained as a nurse in the
1940s, relied on to bring down fevers, which taught us quickly
that it behooved us to stay healthy.
We found forgotten teacups and
old report cards and an unexplained box labeled “Letters —
Discouraging Times.”
And then, exhausted, we sold
what we could to friendly neighbors and sent the goats to a new
owner and packed our vans and stripped the beds.
When we left, east on that
long lane, we left empty rooms behind us, a silent barn, an
abandoned garden.
I posted a nostalgic update
online, and our son Matt commented, “One era ends, another
begins ... your house is quickly becoming ‘the home to go back
to’ for your children.”
Today we picked more
strawberries, pushing the season’s deadline. The children are
busy stemming, talking, getting tired and gradually more silly.
I hope to have 50 pints in the
freezer by the end of the day, all washed and cut and sugared, a
big job accomplished because we worked together until it was
done, because this is what families do, and this is how a home
is made.
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