Baby’s First Berries

When Kris and I first found out we were having a baby, all he could talk about was taking the kid berry picking. I could not think that far in advance. I was only thinking about nausea, about why no one tells you that mucus in your stool is totally normal when you’re pregnant, and how it was impossible to find a bra that I could wear for more than five minutes. I really couldn’t think past how scary and painful labor was going to be. (And let me tell you, it was scary and painful!)

It’s our first full summer back in Alaska since our little water girl was born and Kris has been in a tizzy all season watching the berries swell. They seemed to skip being flowers altogether and sprouted suddenly as tiny green drops dripping off the new plant growth. You might have thought they were just dew. But each day, they seemed to double in size. 

It seemed like a miracle that anything was growing in the drought. Our normally wet marine climate slowly turned more and more dusty. The skies filled with smoke from forest fires. The spruce trees attracted mites and started turning brown. But we kept our eyes on the berries. 

The little mermaid and I started doing recon operations, moving through the woods with her strapped to my back. Spruce forest behind the wall tent: full of berries. The hill past the garden: full of berries. The old wood pile near the knob: Full. Of. Berries.

Kris could hardly contain himself. He got out the trusty old berry-picking coffee cans, sure that we could be filling them to the brim with blueberries.

The berries blushed, turning from their pale green to a lavender. They got plump and juicy, without ever seeing a drop of rain, as if they were absorbing years’ worth of moisture from deep within the earth. 

Kris started rubbing his hands together, plotting out where we would go and when. Half the time he was like some general with strategic maps, and the other half he seemed to be dancing on his tippy toes with glee (and you should definitely picture this with piano tinkling in the background).

When they finally burst into their deep purple-blue, we were basically lined up at the starting line ready to race out. The blueberries seemed to be showering the forest with the rains that had never come.

We took our little one and showed her the berries. She peeked over my shoulder, curious at what was turning my fingertips purple. But she didn’t pick any. Instead, she pulled on fireweed blossoms, horsetail, and birch leaves. 

I handed her berries over my shoulder, one in my bucket, one in her mouth. Time and again we traipsed through the forest and bogs, trying to show her what we were doing. Her eyes were wide, but  she only watched.

In the midst of that blueberry season, my mom and stepdad came to visit. 

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The first time my mother visited our cabin, she was charmed by the berries. When they came that July three years ago, we all toured around the Kenai Peninsula looking for a wedding venue. The highbush blueberries were exploding in ways Kris and I had never seen. Right in our front yard, there were gallons of them, tempting us daily. 

We spent the day picking, and my mother was whisked back to her childhood. She told us about the blueberry bushes in her grandmother’s backyard, how they used to make fire-roasted blueberry pies, with these special pie irons. 

“I have one of those,” my surfer says, and my mom’s eyes widen.

That night, we’re all around the fire pit, taking turns holding the “jaffle iron” that my husband brought back from Australia. (His speech is still distorted from when he lived there. He also says things like “have a squiz” and “good on ya.”) When the iron comes out of the fire and is pried open, there is a perfect little pillow of toasted white bread filled with sweet, fresh blueberries, all melted and gooey. 

My mom is taking pictures, excitedly texting her sisters. It’s like she’s back to being her ten year old self. She’s giddy and her blue eyes are shining.

So for months before Mom and Ron came up to Alaska this year, my mom would ask each time we were on the phone, “How about the blueberries? Are there going to be blueberries when we get there?”

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So we all went. My mom, Ron, my surfer, my water sprite, me and our dog, Blue paraded through the forest to one of the more promising bogs. And yes, there were blueberries. 

And there were definitely blueberries. Another bumper year like their last visit, as if the berries know that my mom is coming and they rush out to meet her.

After picking for a little bit I took my little mermaid off my back. I let her lay in the soft, mossy bog. If you can still call it that when it is dry and thirsty for rain. And as soon as she was free to move and explore on her own, she reached right out for a blueberry and put it in my bucket. 

I gasped.

Out there on that bog, my mother said to me, “This is a really special moment, Jaclyn.”

And when I looked from my daughter to my mother’s face, it was awash with awe.  

And she was right. It was probably the most special, spiritual moment I have had in years. There I was, on this land that I loved, with people that I loved, doing something that I loved, which was connecting with the land that I loved. It was a giant circle, in that way that things are circular when they are perfect, and whole. 

That little sphere of a blueberry was a tiny planet within itself and it was absorbed by the body of my daughter, a universe of possibility. She was being encompassed by the sphere of my mother’s starry love, on this planet that was blue like the berry. And there I sat, in the middle of it all.

The bog’s tussocks rolled like waves and everything was alive and it was all connected. The blue of the berries and pies, the waters and skies, and my mother’s, my own, and my daughter’s eyes.

In every detail of that child, I see her father. In her smile. In her nose. In the way she smears salmon spread all over her face. Except for her eyes. When I look in her eyes, I see me. There’s a depth to the blue about them. As if there’s something more than blue. Like the blueberries. They are the kind of blue that is somehow both the epitome of blue and also unlike any other blue.

And her eyes were twinkling that untouchable blue in a sea of blueberry stars. 

The little mermaid reached for another blueberry and popped it into the bucket. The sound shook me from the trance I was in enough that I clapped for her, at learning to actually pick the berry and put it in the bucket. And she clapped for herself, too.