Green raspberries for breakfast

There are things we love not for what they are, but what they represent to us: Brie cheese will always remind me of college, because of the art department's gallery openings I regularly attended. The smells of a bonfire and pine trees recall my summers at Storybook. Carry on Wayward Son by Kansas was me and my roommate's theme song my last year at Northwestern. And raspberries evoke a very specific memory, one of the oldest that I can remember:

It's a steamy summer morning on the Iron Range of Minnesota. Enter a huge yard, filled with flowers and towering trees grown into the rickety metal fence almost the same age as my grandparents' century old Victorian house. Just outside the back door is a small garden, where two little girls are stuffing their faces with as many raspberries as they can reach. The blonde is my younger sister, Leah, and the curly red head, that's me all of four-years-old. We don't know much about gardening at this point; all we know is that what grows out here is edible. If the red ones are good, then the green ones must be okay too. We completely plucked those bushes bare from the ground to as high as our little grubby hands could reach. We hear the back door open and scamper away. My Grandpa walks out with his bowl of cereal in hand to add some fruit to his breakfast. He gets over to the raspberry bushes and looks around, trying to find any ripe berries that might remain. Leah and I were quite thorough. He looks over at us, our red stained faces, hands and clothes completely giving us away. He chuckles and shakes his head. "Those bushes were full just yesterday! I can't believe you cleaned them all off. I wouldn't be surprised if you got a stomach ache from eating so many, especially the green ones." He went back inside and I could hear him exclaiming to my parents and Grandma how quickly we had made short work of his berry crop.

The house is still there two decades later, though the berry bushes aren't, and my Grandpa won't be around much longer either. My grandparents sold it in 1992, and today it's my uncle's home--he bought it after two different owners almost ruined it. The interior of the house is completely different these days--my aunt and uncle renovated and remodeled the entire thing. I don't really remember much of what the inside used to look like; mostly I recall running around the yard and playing at the park down the street.  The back door garden is gone, but there's even more flowers around the yard as my aunt has quite the green thumb. The fence is still standing with the old trees grown up through it. The back door shutting sounds the same though. And I still remember where the raspberry bushes stood. I can hear the echoes of two little girls' giggling on a blue sky morning as they ate green (and all the red) raspberries for breakfast.

A broken tree

The tree out back broke recently. Cracked right down the middle, like it got hit by lightning. But it didn’t. It simply cracked because it’s brittle. A highbred variety prone to being too stiff to withstand high winds. The day before I had just been admiring how tall it had gotten. My Dad planted it the summer before our neighbor, Mrs. Hanninen, died from cancer. I had laid my hand right on the spot where the tree would splinter apart. I looked up into the leaves as my Mom shucked corn from our garden. The sun played across our faces, and my Mom picked bugs off the cobs as we talked about nothing in particular. She was the one who remembered when the tree got planted. She and Mrs. Hanninen would talk across the fence as they hung laundry on the clothes line. I don’t know what they chatted about, I was too busy chasing bugs and running through the tunnels of drying clothes, leaving dirty hand print streaks on the clean sheets.
The crosshatching lines across the trunk reminded me of my hands, which are pretty lined for someone so young (I’m 24). Trees’ bark is a lot like human skin—they get stretch marks too. The tree had grown so fast its bark had split in places, like a tomato can rip open because the skin can’t keep up with how quickly its insides are expanding. The little tears had already scabbed over; new bark was stretching across the cracks, and would, in time, give the tree more character. Now, I’m just hoping it will make it through the coming winter. My Dad said he’s just going to let it be and see how it fares. If it survives, the tree will be stronger for its ordeal, and if it dies, we’ll cut it down and use it for firewood. I’m hoping for the former outcome though: I’d like to sit underneath that tree someday with my kids and trace the years on my hands as we talk about nothing in particular on a summer day as the tomatoes on the vine burst their skins.