Solstice

In the garden below the house the raspberries are ripening.  They sit on their stalks like red fireflies and sway back and forth in the wind and beckon me to get out of the shade beneath the Autumn Glory maple tree and walk down and sample one. Is there anything in the garden that tastes much better on summer solstice than fresh-picked raspberries?   

The first blueberries are starting to ripen, and the marionberries are turning pink, but it’s the raspberries that have caught my eye, and—even though I know it’s going to be a disappointment—I wander down to the patch and pick a ripe berry and put it in my mouth and try to remember how they taste. A hint of tang and memory remains.  It’s enough.  I turn back in the orchard and climb back up to my chair beneath the maple.

When I planted the maple tree in the apple orchard Patti asked me why.  I told her I wanted red maple leaves each fall, to highlight the apple harvest—the Arkansas Black and King David and Red Rome apples, always spectacularly red, even though many of the other cider varieties are less so.

Beneath the tree, I erected a low rock wall and planted lavender around it, and this solstice the bees are lighting on the stalks and holding on as if they’re on a tilt-a-whirl carnival ride, licking the blossoms, moving to new stalks, and suddenly Frost’s poem, Birches comes to mind, and the boy who swung on his father’s birch trees and bent them to the ground.  I pull the Frost anthology from the shelf and read the poem and pause on the lines: 

I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away…

I return to poems because poetry enlightens.  It helps me find my way.  If it’s Frost, it’s his capacity to simplify that which requires clarity.  If Tony Hoagland, his ability to unexpectedly jump from the birch tree to the ground and roll away laughing.  If Komunyakaa, the brilliance of jeweled language, if W.S. Merwin, his attention to the line.  It's not unlike a return to a favorite trail or a novel read over and over.  What’s familiar reassures.  And as you age—as long as you’re lucky and available and open to it—you can still learn something new.   

The house is my lifeboat now.  I imagine it floating below the orchard on the Columbia, and when I climb the steps to the library’s loft I look at the screen as I write and imagine it’s a wheelhouse and I’ve got control over the lifeboat, which is as close to certifiably absurd as I hope to get.  But it is the solstice, and for this longest of days, I’ll imagine that my chair pitches in the waves, and I’m with the Roberts in Alaska on their boat and can taste the crab.   

Their table is awash in late evening, Alaskan sunlight and shadow, and although you can not see the sky or the water, the table and the blue of the plates is enough:  orange, Dungeness crab legs are arranged on the plates, and cauliflower and chicken has been roasted on a barbecue and there are little cups of drawn butter—for dipping, of course—and there’s what I hope are olives in a sealed, plastic quart container, but if they’re not olives, I hope they are peppers. I forget that my taste buds are on vacation and that everything I put in my mouth except water is disgusting. The saliva dripping down my chin in this dream is the harbinger of a delicious meal on the sea with good friends.  I am shackled to the dream, like a prisoner bound to a mast, and I know as well as I know anything I’m going to ask for my taste buds back, and a last meal of shellfish.  

I no longer know the language of crab pot or clam gun.  I can imagine walking a beach and sinking in the sand so deep I’d have to grab a shovel to dig myself out. We have all endured loss to such depth that the darkness beneath the sand must remain unimaginable. For the time being, I will stay in my chair in the orchard and look out on the trees, branches bent not by a boy, but by the mystery and affection of red apples.  

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