String Too Short to Be Saved by Donald Hall

Author:Donald Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Eight

The Blueberry Picking

One day in late July 1945, I woke at six when my grandmother brought the black coffee into my bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed and gulped it down. It was made in an old drip coffee pot on the iron stove, where a kettle was always simmering, and it was nearly as thick as Turkish. The shades were still down, and the morning light showed in a thousand pinpricks through the worn green cloth. I crossed the room and opened the shades, and heard a rooster crow in the hen yard across the road. A big automobile blew past, making an early start for the White Mountains. I always looked out to see what kind of day it would be. Rain? A scorcher? It looked fine and sunny today. I walked back to the bed, where my coffee cup sat on the table between my typewriter and a vase of flowers which my grandmother had picked. I sat on the bright quilt and finished the coffee.

This was the start of a day we had planned for weeks. In the years past, before I was born, my grandfather had made an annual excursion to pick blueberries. I had heard about those days in many of his stories. The blueberries were the low, wild kind, and they grew among the ledges of blue rock at the top of Ragged Mountain. They were a three-mile walk from the farmhouse, and the walk was mostly up. When my grandfather was younger, he and a hired man would pick for one long day, and my grandmother and her daughters would wash, sort, and can them for two days. A shelf of cold-packed quarts of blueberries would wait in the cellar for the piecrusts of winter. It was one of the many ways in which a farmer compensated for his lack of cash-like the eggs from the laying season stored in waterglass, and like the salted meat from the slaughtering.

My grandfather had talked about it so much that it seemed as much past as the Lyceum and the two-hour sermons. But a few weeks earlier, this past had strangely seemed present to us. Paul Whittier had been chasing a bear which had tramped down his peas, and had followed him all the way to the top of Ragged. (It was not only a lust for revenge which drove him; the anachronistic bounty on bears was $50.) He had lost his bear among the rocks on the other side of the mountain, but among the blue ledges of the top he had found the blueberries thicker than ever. They were green then, or he said he would have been up there eating them still.

No one, as far as my grandfather knew, had picked there for twenty years. The berries were higher up than the forests which had been cut of their soft wood ten years before, or the lumberjacks would have stripped them. No one else in the neighborhood would have cared to make the climb.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.