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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (March 1, 2004)
BROWNSMEAD STORIES BY DEBBY BARENDSIE REED BERRYPICKING In the morning fog that still clings to the low landscape we are quiet on separate sides of the same row. Hunting down wild blackberries used to take all day. It was my mother's job to load the station wagon with kids, dogs, pails, bologna and potato chip sandwiches on white bread. Bumping down gravel logging roads, she always found spots the county spray crew missed. Our navigational skills have grown scarce so we head for Sauvie's Island where the berries grow in ladylike rows on family farms. Grandma’s bucket is on a rope around her neck leaving both hands free to pick. I try it her way but give up laughing telling her I have too much education to be any good at field work. As the sun climbs, our work gets serious. I can feel my bare shoulders burning. She is much faster than I so much farther down the row I can’t hear anymore. Nearby tractors kick up a fine dust that settles around me. I figure she's remembering her life on the farm. How she made a living peeling chitum bark and digging razor clams before you needed a license. How my uncles were the soldiers that came home. How her only daughter became so sick we knew she couldn’t get better. The field is so large the tractor is just a faraway buzzing in my ears. We stop for my sake, long before she’s ready. W e’ll come back when the green peaches hanging low on the stub trees around us are ripe. Riding home loosened by sun and work, we laugh over how she divorced the grandpa I never knew by not setting his place at the family table one night. How I threw my husband’s things out on the lawn and told him things would be easier without him. Not much like my parents I say boldly who never did get around to it. I ask the questions I never got to last time I went on this trip. M IC H A E L d e W A ID E THE ONLY TIME I SAW MY MOTHER DANCE It was at my first wedding. She was probably already sick though we didn't know it. It didn't show in the blue swishy dress cinched tight at her waist or in the young flush of her cheeks as she tried to move like one of my boy-groom’s friends who had been pressed into partnership. She was like a small child or even a puppy finding its first freedom from the parent’s hand or the leash. She moved unpredictably, unsensuously, wholesome and pure, never in time with the music. Now, years after, it is not my husband’s smooth face or the grown-up happenings of the day, or the stiff, cheap lace dress my grandmother made me that I remember, but my mother in her moment's delight. She drifted into sickness soon after and my husband went his own way and had an affair with the pizza delivery girl. But as I think of my mother, twirling, gesturing wildly, her blue dress swirling around her fine, strong calves, I almost feel I should call up my ex-husband and thank the son-of-a-bitch. CHARITABLE CONTRIBUTIONS Always be ready with something to get others through the hard times. Tell of eating fishbacks and handwashing clothes. Offer up how you used to walk to the market with your mother’s food stamps to buy family milk and save her pride. How you rode the ferris wheel at the state fair with your father & his girlfriend but didn't tell your mother. Don’t flinch away from the time your own child tucked you into bed, read you her library book and told you it would probably be okay Stay away from passes on, being let go, it’s not you it’s me, crumbling cookies, bouncing balls, water that’s already under the bridge Stop for a moment and tell us a story. Tell about the time you had too much to drink and drove your pickup truck straight over the dike into the slough. Upside down in the water you kicked through the window and walked on home to tell your husband to go back & dive in to get your purse Backtracking home, roadside stands selling flats of fruit for ten bucks . I Îlû«, J 1 1 I 'J Y • <-> make her shake her head and scold. Separating our flats in the drive, I wave her on her way. I’ll be buying flats of berries someday soon but for now, I wash and bag my berries for the freezer in the same afternoon just like I’ve been taught. TALKING TO YOURSELF Begin with bicycle winds whooshing around your ears down steep hills. Happy dollhouse chatter — sober and affectionate. Catalog rustlings of canopy beds with matching vanities and tiny pedestal benches trimmed golden. Become flimsy, paperback romance whisperings behind heavy brown false-fronted grammar and history books. Décolletage rising, falling until Mrs. Stahl plucks away the petals, hands out books with hard covers and says “you'll never grow up till you learn to tolerate an unhappy ending." Move to dingy, coffeeshop smokings. Desiring literature, write down every conversation. Hold tightly to diaries, scrapbooks, and journals full of big nervous words. Run into junk drawers full of tedious, embarrassing bits of paper. See other gesturing girls talking deeply while trying to attract the attention of boys, then men. Take English for a major figuring on law school, teaching a masters degree or something like that. Then Mother gets sick. And her funeral is just read-aloud passages carefully copied from other people’s books; bumper stickers, refrigerator magnets, stolen T-shirt slogans. In cleaning and rearranging after, there is a diary. Uncreased and blank, her name written on the first page then nothing else. After that, start small, sports and weather mostly. Pick berries with Grandma while she talks to herself. Sun warming your bare shoulders, just listen. Nod approvingly over the buckets while eating tuna fish and butter sandwiches side-by-side on the tailgate. Stand when her time comes. Say in a loud clear voice what you say even when no one is listening. Go on like this. Mornings in the garden, clear out brown spaces around plants. Sit children in an afternoon circle to hear anything friendly. If a good man breathes in darkness, quietly listening, talk to yourself while he doesn’t try to fix a thing. Friends will puzzle the habit; explain its praying. God can hear everything, they claim. Go to church Sundays. Listen to the music but don’t drink the wine. Not cynical Not pessimistic. Just not asking for anything in return The poems on these pages are from Debby Barendsie Reed’s book, Brownsmead Stories She is a lifelong resident of the Oregon north coast, a teacher, poet, waitress and mother. ■ «Ml N THE WAY I REMEMBER HER When the muffler was falling off her old Chevy Malibu and lacking the money or patience or interest to fix it, my mother sent me out to drive the car up and down our gravel driveway till it fell off on its own. When I questioned the wisdom of this plan she just looked at me and said, “Chin above water, smile on your face." WHEN YOUR MOTHER DIES You cannot go home again. Someone else lives there, though it’s only been a month. You no longer want a fold-out, futon couch or brick and board bookcases that can't be dusted. You want real things. Whole things. You inherit certain legacies — the antique oak table, the big, blue mixing bowl. You eat dinner at the table. You try to bake bread. You still pick up the phone sometimes. Even dial the intimate numbers before you realize. And you hang her fuchsias remembering to water them each day, watching the water drip from the hanging buckets — forming a puddle at your feet and slowly drying into the sun.
