Lion and Magic Boy

This post title has actually been sitting in my queue, mocking me, since August. Originally it was the title of a post that was going to tell all about my trip to Colorado, but that was eons ago, lifetimes ago, so I am repurposing it, being the thrifty little environmentally-correct blogger that I am.

But first I should tell you how the title came up, I think.

A few days before our trip to Colorado, Matthew acquired a Blackberry (you see where this is going already, don’t you?), and during those six days, still being quite enthralled with it, he couldn’t help but crow over the fact that he had cell service everywhere, even atop Pike’s Peak, when I was constantly gnashing my teeth over my useless T-Mobile Razr.

So now you know. Was it worth the wait?

This morning the clouds parted, and, lo! The sun! Behold the sky! So I was compelled to go for another run and later, a walk down the the beach. In all that rain yesterday, did that walk become steeper somehow? Why yes, I believe it did.

Wee white cords leaking out of my ears and filling my head with the sound of Ants Marching, I tramped down the steepage toward the beach, brushing aside the occasional brambly vine that snaked out to snag my sleeve. Some sort of berry vine, maybe. Look at those thorns! March, march, slide slowly down the slippery wet-leaved slope toward the beach.

I strode from one end of the beach to the other, unplugging my iPod from my head and listening to the waves instead, lapping/crashing up the rocky beach strewn with huge eroded logs, rounded smooth stones, snakelike seaweed as big around as Eric’s arms and twice as long as he is tall, and so many shells in their completeness I quickly abandoned taking home more than a few for the children. I balanced atop long smooth logs, walking their length like a tightrope, wetting my Saucony-clad shoe only a little in the cold water. You could see across the bay to the mainland, trees and amid them tall white stacks belching particulates.

I came back to where the path went back up to the foresty treeness and there sat a man, his face turned westward to the lowering sun, his eyes closed. He wasn’t there to see the water, he was there for the sun.

As I moved away from the beach and began the path up, up, and up, I glanced at the bushes lining the path. Same thorns, watch out! But…wait…these look familiar. Blackberries! With several still on the vines, mostly dried and way past their season, but…here…and here…and here. I picked some and ate them.

As I reached in through the brambly vines I remembered the first time I picked blackberries. I had elected to remain at college and just sort of hang out there for the summer, the summer after spring break. It was really quiet since most people had homes to go to, or jobs maybe. Me, I took the bus to the store once a week and bought a box of crackers and some peanut butter and took long, long walks, coming back to my empty double room in which I had pushed the two twin beds together to make one large bed where I slept, mostly alone, enjoying the silence and the fact that I didn’t have a roommate.

In one of those walks I discovered the Blackberry Bushes.

I don’t think many of the people staying over for the summer knew about these, because there were tons of berries hanging heavily from the brambly vines, huge ones, the biggest blackberries I have yet to see before or since. They were delicious, and for a few weeks I went every day until the picking became harder as people found them and the season progressed. It was the single best thing about my entire college experience, most of the rest of which was a blur of discomfort, an ill-fitting shoe quickly discarded.

I reflected a little on this as I continued walking up the hill, now noticing how obviously present the blackberry bushes were that lined the path, marveling at my chosen blindness to things that are right in front of me as I navigate this path of life. I am such a warrior sometimes, choosing a direction and then settng an unveering course, blasting over and through obstacles, blind to the tiny moments of now-ness. My most vivid picture-memory of Paris is from my first trip there, a picture of the cobblestones, the uneven stones over which it was my job to navigate Nathaniel’s stroller, and so fixed on that was I that I missed the buildings, and the people, that lined those cobblestoned streets. There is no memory of faces, only cold stones.

I picked a handful of blackberries for Matthew, who will appreciate their past-season sweetness, and clutched that handful, along with a cluster of wee pinecones from an alder tree like the one decorating the front yard of the house I grew up in, all the way up the (now much much steeper) hill.

At the top I paused and stood in the sun for awhile, still holding my tiny handful of blackberries, and reflected on the gifts the sun brings us, warming me and having once provided food for the berries I now held in my hand, and ever mindful itself of the gifts WE bring to it, the sun.

I walked back to my little cabin, taking a different path this time.