The blackberries and sugar were boiling on the stove. It smelled wonderful. All afternoon Grandmama and Grandpapa made plans for their friends, and at the end of the day, besides all their plans there were thirty-five pints of blackberry jam.
September Storm
I watch the storm unhitch
the yellow leaves
from off the birch,
grab the poplar by its scruff,
toss two helpless
gulls that hover
above the tumbled waves.
I watch the bank
I’d walked upon
crumble like a slice of cake
into the gully’s belly.
I know that ground,
I know its fleece of chickweed flowers,
its golden dandelions, its taste of sour sorrel.
I know fall will follow
on the storm
to sweep summer
into the net of my
remembering.
Yesterday while I was packing my things the storm came. It happened so suddenly we weren’t ready for it. It didn’t start with a few plashes of rain on the sidewalk or a dance on the lake. The sky exploded with flashes and a roar of thunder. The wind threw a fit. A minute later the water came down as if someone were throwing it at us, just as Grandmama throws dishwater on her roses.
We ran through the house shutting windows, but the rain was ahead of us, and we had to mop the floors. When the rain was shut out we stood at the windows watching the show. It was a real roughhouse. The birch tree bent over until its branches swept the ground. Apples, pears, and plums rocketed over the orchard. Along the edge of the bank the ground crumbled away into the gully.
What I couldn’t stop looking at was the lake. It was turning itself inside out. It was like someone you love suddenly growing angry. The whitecaps came crashing onto the shore. The water reached farther and farther up onto the beach until even the pump house was threatened. A couple of seagulls were tossed around over the churning water. There wasn’t a boat to be seen. I hoped the Billy Boy was safe on shore.
Just as we finished our supper, the lights went out. Grandpapa brought out kerosene lamps. “Just like old times,” he said. The lamps were bright enough so that you could see, but not bright enough that you could see much. I couldn’t read, and Grandmama couldn’t sew, but Grandpapa could play his violin. He played for nearly an hour while the wind and rain and thunder carried on outside like the loudest orchestra you ever heard.
This morning when I awoke the sun was dancing on my ceiling. I hurried into my clothes and ran to see what was left of my garden. The snapdragons had laid down and died. The cages had saved my tomato plants, but a lot of the tomatoes had shaken loose. Some of them were still green. “We’ll have to throw them away,” I said.
“No, no,” Grandmama told me. “They won’t go to waste. We can make green tomato pickles.”
Grandpapa was walking around in the orchard. Branches were scattered everywhere. Fruit that had blown off the trees lay on the ground. I couldn’t see Grandpapa’s face, but I could see how his shoulders were hunched over. He began putting the fallen fruit into a bushel basket. Grandmama and I helped. This time it was Grandmama who was trying to cheer up Grandpapa. “I was going to make jelly today, anyhow,” she said. “Now the fruit has been picked for us.”
“By rough hands,” Grandpapa said with a sad shake of his head.
When we were finished filling the bushel baskets with the bruised fruit I walked down the stairs past the pump house to the beach. The lake was perfectly calm, but all along the beach were souvenirs from the storm. The huge waves had washed in floats from fishing nets and bits of pink and green and lavender glass worn smooth by the water. It was as though the lake had scattered those pretty things along the beach, like presents. It wanted to show that, in spite of the storm, we were still friends.
Last Look
They have shuttered
the eyes of the cottage,
the dresser drawer
pockets are picked,
in the pump house
the heartbeat has stopped.
All that is left
of the summer
is a bushel of pears
in the trunk of the car.
Beyond the birch tree
is bright water
and the smoke
that I see
at the top
of the lake’s
wide blue page
is the freighter’s
sooty scrawl,
“Go away and return,
go away and return.”
Summer’s over, and I’m going home. Grandmama and Grandpapa and I stood at the end of the driveway watching my parents’ car come toward us. When I first came to Greenbush, all I wanted was to go home. Now my parents were coming to take me back to the city, and I almost didn’t want to go.
“How healthy you look!” Mom threw her arms around me.
“How tall you’ve grown!” Dad had a wide grin on his face.
I laughed. “Grandmama and Grandpapa make everything grow!”
I held onto my parents’ hands and led them to the orchard. I named all the fruit trees for them: Jonathan, Rome Beauty, Spitzenburg, Mayflower, Elberta, Red Haven, Russetts, Bosc, Bartlett, Damson, and Mirabelle. The trees were like good friends.
I got the salt cellar and took Mom and Dad to my own garden. I showed them how we pick tomatoes right off the vine and eat them still warm from the sun. I gave them the bag of my own beans all ready to take home. “Next year,” I said, “Grandmama and Grandpapa promised I could have a bigger garden.”
I took them to see the lake. I showed them all the things you could find along the beach. I even made them climb down into the gully. “What did you do down here?” Mom asked. “There seem to be a lot of bugs and weeds and things.”
“That’s why I like it,” I said, and I told them the names of the bugs and weeds.
Grandmama took Mom into the pantry to see the jars of fruit and jam and the green tomato pickles. There was a big box all packed with jars for us to take home. Every time we opened a jar of peaches or tomatoes or blackberry jam I would remember the day Grandmama had made them. Grandpapa had picked us a bushel of pears.
We were just going to have our lunch when Tommy turned up. He always seemed to know when it was time to eat. He brought us a big package. “It’s some pickerel,” he. said. Pickerel is just about the best-tasting fish you can get. “You can take it home with you. It’s fresh. We caught it this morning.” The fish was wrapped in newspapers and chopped ice like they have at Meyer’s Fish House. The newspapers were all wet, and the package was leaking.
Mom took it and held it a little way away from her. “Pickerel is my favorite fish. We’ll certainly enjoy this. Thank you so much.”
“Who is this very nice young man?” Dad asked. Everyone waited for me to introduce Tommy, so I had to.
“You’re probably giving your folks a big dinner,” Tommy said, so Grandmama asked him to stay and eat with us. He kicked my shins under the table and I kicked his back. Also he took the last piece of cake on the plate, which isn’t polite. He told fibs, too. “My dad and I saw this huge fish that was as big as this whole house. We would have caught it if we had had a cat to tie on our line. Fish that big just eat cats.”
“Where do fish get cats to eat in the middle of the lake?” I wanted to know.
“People who want to get rid of their cats and kittens dump them in the lake to drown. It happens all the time.”
“It does not! That’s a terrible thing to say!” Tommy just shrugged. As he was getting ready to go home, Tommy said, “I’ll see you next year.”
“Not if I see you first,” I said. He punched me in the arm and I punched him back.
In spite of the fact that we had just finished a huge lunch, Grandmama packed a big supper for us to eat in the car. Later in the week my grandparents would leave the cottage for the city, too. Dad and Grandpapa were
closing some of the shutters on the windows. Mother and Grandmama were putting sheets on the furniture so it wouldn’t get dusty over the winter. The cottage was beginning to look like it was getting ready for ghosts.
Finally it was time to go. Our car was loaded. I hugged Grandmama and Grandpapa. Hard. While my mother and dad were saying good-bye to my grandparents, I slipped away to the front of the house. There was the screen porch. There was my old apple tree. And there, stretching as far as I could see, was the shining lake. I stood watching it a long minute. Then I walked slowly back to the car and climbed in.
About the Author
Gloria Whelan is a poet, short story writer, and novelist best known for her children’s and young adult fiction. Whelan has been writing since childhood and was the editor of her high school newspaper. Many of her books are set in Michigan, but she also writes about faraway places based on her travels abroad. In 2000 she won the National Book Award for her young adult novel Homeless Bird. Her other works have earned places among the American Library Association’s Best Books for Young Adults, the International Reading Association’s Teachers’ Choices and Children’s Choices, Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People, and Los Angeles’ 100 Best Books. Whelan has also received the Mark Twain Award and the O. Henry Award. She lives in Detroit, Michigan.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright ©1994 by Gloria Whelan
Cover design by Mimi Bark
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7388-5
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Gloria Whelan, That Wild Berries Should Grow
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