It was an unseasonably warm August day, only two weeks before I would start college. The sun seemed unnaturally bright to me; the lack of clouds made me angry, infuriated at the sky's inappropriate cheer. It was a day for picnics and flirtation.
Mothers are not buried on such days
, I thought to myself. My mother deserved somber greys; the world should have been washed in it, made sterile and brittle in mourning for her.
We were back at my mother's house, an entire extended family in tow. My older sister was hosting a wake; always the good girl, she wanted to please the Welsh and Irish relatives. Three bottles of rye in, the family was waxing nostalgic as only a batch of drinkers can, reliving their favorite moments with my mother, fighting over claims about who loved her most. To me, she was a different person.
Although I didn't want to, I resented their intrusion on my grief. She was my mother, though they called her Anwen, and I wanted to hoard my memories of her, clutch them to my like a shield. I couldn't drink, although everyone would have allowed it, and I would never call my mother Anwen. She had always just been Mom, and to me she always would be. I didn't fit, a feeling I was used to, but it only made the pull of loss seem greater.
I wandered outside on my own, the bright day was starting to cool as the afternoon wore on, and I couldn't stand the house anymore, filled as it was with drunken relatives and my own bitterness. If I was going to be alone, I didn't want to be surrounded by well-intentioned relations.
The house was a ramshackle monstrosity, an addition-laden part of the development which had come abruptly to Humboldt county in the post-war years. It was a hideously designed quasi-Victorian mess, one that we'd always teased Mom for holding onto when she could have afforded better and could certainly have used smaller. Its saving grace was the sweep of hilly land around it. Green and fragrant, the rich soil produced honeysuckle and ivy by the ton; it was the only place I've ever seen wild peacocks strut their regal stuff and look right at home.
I followed the curving trail my mother's own wanderings had beaten into the lush growth. Around the second bend, I came to the large stone she had taken to using as a resting place when the cancer started gaining ground on her will to outpace it. The top was scraped clear from months of her lingering pauses. I slowed, not sure if I could face walking her path after all.
I stopped in her resting place, sitting as she had, not sure if I could continue. Tears sprang to my eyes for the hundredth time that day, and I felt my heart thumping in my chest, skipping beats for each unshed tear. The torrent came, and I let it take me, grieving for the fierce, proud woman I'd loved. I cried until I couldn't stand the sound of my own wailing anymore; I tried to relax into the hiccuping after-effects, looked desperately for a way to distract myself from my grief and the embarrassing flood of my own self-pity.
In the final weeks, she must not have been able to walk her beloved trail, because the wild blackberry bushes were overladen with late fruit. Sitting there, I remembered coming down the path with my sister as young children, our mother waiting for us to bring back the sweet berries she would add to our cereal. We'd eat as we picked, learning over time not to prick our fingers on the brambles. We never learned how not to stain our hands with juice; Mom always smiled indulgently at us when we came back.
And now, it seemed there would be no one to pick them. But nature didn't care about my loss, didn't yet know it had also lost her. On this day, the bushes were heavy with wild growth, a late harvest of bittersweet berries awaited hands that knew the secret to stealing them away. The air was full of the smell, richly sweet and heavy, like a fragrant wine served on a velvet cloud. My eyes filled with tears again.
I wanted to feel something else, anything but the agony of loss. I raced through my memories of the blackberry patch, looking for some kind of solace.
"I came here with Bobby Thomas," the memory came to me out of nowhere, the words spoken aloud before they fully registered in my brain. We grew up together, Bobby and I, and hated each other as was required of our age and gender difference. When we were teenagers, we became real friends, and one late summer evening, we fumbled off each other's clothes right out here, at the end of the second bend in the path. I remembered that the air was full of blackberries that night too.
