The Color of Summer
Judith Horstman
All year long, it sleeps in the mind’s eye, elusive. A few days each year, I go to find it, climbing Wildcat Hill near Peterborough, New Hampshire, with a backpack and my best friend, brushing through ferns and twigs and clambering over disheveled stone walls in search of blueberries.
It’s always high summer and golden hot, and we set off eagerly, tasting blueberry pie, blueberry muffins, blueberry jam. The climb leaves us breathless with exertion and anticipation. Near the balding top of Wildcat we wade into overgrown pasture, rustling through heath and young trees. There, matting the hillside, are blueberries.
So that’s what it was: the color of babies’ eyes, night skies, lake water. And we bend down, plastic milk cartons dangling on a string from our necks, to pull off the fruit with both hands.
It takes the patience of age and the supple body of youth to pick wild blueberries. They are so small, so sweet, so hard to pick, and it takes so many to fill a bucket. The first ones always get eaten, a reward in advance, because soon, too soon, the back begins to ache.
I get annoyed at the time it takes, creeping across the heath, the heat. Then the rhythm takes over. In the hot high thrum of New England August, really, what is the hurry?
My friend wanders out of sight, pursuing a growth line of her own. We are separated by trees and shrubs, but still within earshot. Our fingers are stamped purple. Our tongues turn blue-black and loosen. This is when confidences come, amid the rustle of the stiff bushes, the silence of midday, and the isolation.
When our girls were young, they used to pick with us. They camped here in long nightgowns, like Victorian princesses, eating smeary handfuls of blueberries from their bedrolls. As they grew older, they preferred to go pick on their own, giggling, and long-legged, blue eyes flashing. We would hear their voices singing across the side hill. They had secrets, too, probably the same ones my dear friend and I have been sharing since we were their age: the uncertainty of the future, the meaning of the past, mistakes and lucky guesses, and what one should or could do next.
The August day ambles on. I tell her about the story that blueberries were once used by Shakers to tint milk-based paint a mystical blue. “Imagine,” I tell her as the afternoon birds swoop and dart above us, “picking enough blueberries to paint a room. Imagine!”
Cicadas hum on the hot rocks. The young trees sigh in the light wind. I hear my friend now, humming also, off-key. Ah. That’s how it was. Blueberries.
I do this almost every August for decades, traveling from wherever I am living at the time –-New York, Oregon, California, Europe. It was one of many rituals we shared — climbing that hill so many times over more than 40 years until, finally, illness made it impossible for my friend to go there other than in memory. Our last shared journeys were to Monterey, where she came to escape the New England winters for the last few years of her life.
Blind by then, her travels restricted to boardwalk strolls by the sea, she asked me to describe those days: the clouds, the hills, the heat, the colors, our children, the blueberries. The way we would pick enough each summer to fill the freezer, the jam jars, the pie plates. I could pick only those few days when I visited each August, so I recalled the events, the exact turning of each blueberry day, with a piercing vision. Together we went there in memory many times those final years.
She is gone now, and I buy my blueberries in grocery stores in Northern California. But the hillside remains, and the blueberries remain, growing and ripening each year regardless of the march of time and our absence. And so do my memories of the high-summer days, our youth and our girls.
I haven’t been there in many years. Yet each time I open a jar of blueberry jam, a continent and lifetime away from those days, that time, I go back to the way it was, then. To the way we were.
Ah. That’s how it was. Blueberries.
