Thom Rock - Blueberry Fool: Memory, Moments, and Meaning

T he berries ripen in such abundance; I bow and bend in their presence. Having quickly learned the harvesting work my fingers do so all on their own, leaving my mind to wander. And where it wanders to most often is memory. One moment I am aware of the summer sun on my back, my hands working away in the tangle of berry, leaf, and twig. The next: a flock of memories have ghosted their way into the meadow. Whether or not the repetitive motions and the sound of berries falling into bucket influence this phenomenon I do not know. But when I am out there in the meadow filling a tin pail with those indigo gems, time ceases to march in an orderly fashion, sometimes standing still, but more often than not sliding backwards in a moonwalk of memory. Moments from time appear unbidden and as mysterious as question marks interwoven amongst the grasses and goldenrods. I find myself in the past, or at least in the company of those who inhabit it. Do I somehow transport myself to them, I wonder, or is it they who come to me?

Our lives are made of moments in time. And, at the same time, everything is memory save for that slimmest slip of time that just now slipped by. Yet we order our lives around the faade of the calendar, the upswing of the pendulum, the accuracy and endurance of memory. We separate past and present as if they were opposing notions. We feebly attempt to mark and measure our days regardless of whether they stretch out lazily in the long summer sun or curl up tight under winters equally long night. They pile up behind us: a handful of years, a thousand moons, until eventually time seems to fly and moments appear to pass by more quickly. You reach beneath a berry branch one morning and find not your own fingers stretching out for the blue from the cuff of your sleeve but those of your fathers work-worn hands.

In those moments I am no longer in this northern meadow but seated at the old oak table at a family reunion; my mother setting the table with her mothers favorite china painted with tiny blue forget-me-nots, my sister and I arguing over which of us should get to sit on the high wooden stool, its rickety legs bound and reinforced with baling wire. Or Im walking up the dirt road with my family one long-ago evening catching fireflies with my sister. Or I catch a glimpse through the sweet steam of my mother laughing with her brothers, maple sap boiling wildly before them in the broad, flat metal pan in the middle of the sugarhouse, in the middle of the woods.

There have indeed been times in this time-lost meadow when I have plucked a particularly sweet memory from these berry bushes and held it wonderingly in my palm, not ever wanting to let it go. But memory, like time, is always moving, even when wed rather stand still. I know I cannot inhabit the past, or at least if I choose to do so exclusively I run the risk of missing out on those moments that might, in turn, become my future memories. Or in other words: my life. But holding on to a memory is not the same as inhabiting the past, and a vivid moment can return us to its illuminating source if only for a moment.

And yet those sweet moments seem to spring up suddenly and apart from no obvious pattern. With no clear warning a memory might swell, blossom, and bear fruit in the blueberry barren. The wind teasing the tall grasses just so, a certain breath of air, or the sound of travelling geese journeying high above... and suddenly I am inexplicably somewhere else, in a place and time that no longer is. Not exactly a then-and-there but a then-again. A long-lost summer afternoon, a rope swing swung over an arcing branch. An iconic image that appears frozen in time, like an unsuspecting fly stuck in amber. Yet these fragments of memory are fleeting: despite their crystalline cells, they still hum and whir. They can even take flight.

Which is it, then: is memory moving or static? Is it a fossilized jewel kept inside some velvet-lined treasure box to be taken out at will and admired? Or might it be something equally delicate but surely winged, an ever-evolving insect capable of metamorphosis and migration? Either way, Id like to believe these moments will never fade away, but memory also has a trick up its sleeve: it can disappear in the wink of an eye. So I line the fluttering memories up across the page syllable after syllable to make of them something indelible. Something to believe in.

Even if memory is a time-traveler, a shapeshifter, it is what I believe in. What we remember and how we remember it shapes the story of our lives, of who we are. When we call forth moments from our individual journeys, or when they arrive unbidden, we cannot help attaching to them meaning and definition. The past becomes present in the present as well as the future: we become our memories.

I believe in memory because at the sight of a single firefly it carries me, in a flash, over and through time to a long-ago velvet night. I believe in memory because I have felt in the meadow, as real and present as if I were a child again, my own mothers hand pressed upon my chest. I believe in memory because I also believe that death is not the end of our story. That the story of everyone I have ever loved continues, their story and mine, beyond what we presume to be the end. Admittedly, I am uneasy stating this belief; I am not entirely comfortable defining myself as a person of belief, of faith. What are the implications of saying, for example, that I believe love lives on, that we live on? Am I automatically embracing a belief that heaven exists and is where my beloveds abide? Im not really sure. Nor can I state with unwavering trust that I believe in the power of prayer. Yet if I do not recognize the moments from time that appear to me in the meadow as just thatas grace-filled prayerswell, the alternative is disconcerting at the very least. If faith equals certainty, I am undoubtedly uneasy, for I cannot grasp how I might ever prove how meaningfully I have experienced memory amidst a hillside of wild blueberries.

Still, I cannot imagine myself saying, I do not believe.