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Black Gold My parents’ dream house, built on the vacant lot behind my childhood home, featured a sprawling waterfront meadow with its own blackberry patch. There, my mother delighted in serving fresh berries and cream to her grandbabies for breakfast. When my girls were older, she taught them to bake flaky blackberry pies sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. And when my mother died, those blackberries were the black gold of my daughters’ fondest summer memories. For me, though, they evoke the memory of the black mark I felt on my soul the summer I first knew I’d disappointed her. Life changed when Mama went back to work and started college. Before that, summers at our lakeside camp in Maine were carefree as crickets in June. My brothers and I were free to swim, fish and explore the woods all day. It didn’t matter when or how often the screen door clapped our comings and goings as long as we came when the dinner bell rang. Dad commuted to work, and Mama basked in an idyll of creativity: reading – all the Pulitzers one year, writing doggerel, doing crosswords and watercolors, cooking and singing songs as dated as her clunky appliances.When we drove home once a week for laundry, mail and supplies, the hum of our tires on Memorial Bridge tugged at my gut as we crossed the Piscataqua from Maine into New Hampshire. Portsmouth was fine for the rest of the year, but it couldn’t compare with Bauneg Beg Pond, for despite New Hampshire’s coastal breeze, everything there felt more oppressive. I missed the whisper of pines, the hammock’s sway, and the moths that flit around the porch light. I missed the smell of our fresh lumber cocoon and the open expanse of rooms in progress. I missed my bare bedroll on the plywood floor and the rhythmic chug of the well under the floorboards every time someone flushed the toilet. It’s hard to be carefree in the same room where you bring your troubles during the school year. Back in Portsmouth there was no serene solitude. The other kids, mostly boys, were a raucous crowd, and the neighbors lived so close you could hear their dinnertime harangues through the open windows. We watched TV, played predictable games and got bored. Swimming in the tidal flats at the end of the street was a frigid, salty affair so littered with periwinkles and broken glass that we had to wear sneakers. Portsmouth felt right in September, but not before Labor Day. Then rumors of an imminent closure at the shipyard where my father worked spurred my parents to sell the camp as a fiscal precaution against the anticipated real estate glut. I didn’t know that the proudest day of my life up to then, the day I learned to slalom water ski like my big brothers, was to be our last day there. The camp was sold by Christmas, and Mama began making preparations to start college. She’d had enough of secretarial work after two years of working the opposite shift from my father, and finally decided if she was going to have to work anyway, it would be at something she enjoyed. Mama missed the camp perhaps more than any of us, and as she felt the pressure of too much work in her life and too few hours in the day, her stress infected us all. She worked days and studied for her CLEP (College Level Examination Program) tests by night while Dad was working. We kids worked at being quiet during the day so Dad could sleep, and since I was only ten, too young to be on my own, my brothers had to drag me along wherever they went. We spent mornings at Parks and Rec programs and afternoons at the public pool. Both were crowded with toughs from the South End, but at least we were supervised. Late one afternoon we were playing baseball with the neighborhood boys in the vacant lot behind our house when a line drive over second plate screamed over my crouched form. It scared me so much I dropped my buttercups, but the boys were just as surprised when we found the ball deep in the brambles and discovered black gold. It was a tangle of blackberry bushes bent with bounty untouched for generations, hidden behind a buffer of wild grasses, cat tails, and poison sumac. Blackberries looked foreign to our Maine blueberry-accustomed eyes. There were no blackberries at the lake. They seemed like mutant raspberries with a sinister name, but when the other kids started gobbling them like movie popcorn we knew they must be good. Like bears, we gorged and snuffled and jammed seeds between our teeth until our hands were stained with greed. Then skinny little Eddie, the first to wriggle into the morass, had an attack of thoughtfulness. Or maybe it was just his sweet tooth talking. |
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