Notes on Place

BLUEBERRIES

My mother still brags that she never gets lost in the bush. As a child I would go out with her picking berries. We each would find our own small patch and keep moving so as not to over pick. This keeps you at quite a distance from each other. I have to close my eyes to remember the bush as it was. The ground is mostly moss and lichen covered rock, dry and crisp from the midsummer sun, with evergreens, low bush, and wild blueberries that hover over the rock like tiny velvety blue Christmas balls. The scent, heavy and warm, an intermingling of dry pine needles, spruce, fir, dead wood, pungent earth, fresh growth. We listen for bears. The insects sing the air visible; black flies, deer flies, mosquitos, and dragonflies chorus around us, nipping. Everything is still, but vibrating, and I vibrate with it. I’m not really that interested in picking, just in being here. When I look up, I see the top of my mothers head of dark hair, so different from my own, and I know I belong here. I am this place, this place is me.

This place lives in my memory … as do all the voices of this place, both present and not (everyone from there knows that all the flies have their own season). At the time, I didn’t understand that there was communication happening in that chorus of vibrations. I only understood it as home. Now my mother tells me I don’t want to return to that place. It has changed. Of course all places do. Like everyone I know, my mother included, places too, embody emergent processes shaped by relationship and time’s powers of transformation (Bjornerud).