The first thing out of the doctor’s mouth was “how is your summer going?” and I felt like slapping her but I stayed in my chair, recalling ultrasounds with heartbeats and ultrasounds without, hexagonal pills and searing pain and a bag labelled “biohazard,” and I remembered the mockery of the sun on my face as I carried the bag on the bus in my purse and delivered it to the hospital where a nurse removed the container from inside the bag, held it up to the light and chirped, “You got the right thing!” and took it away to be tested since this was number four and four wasn’t normal, especially when you’re 29, and she called me a month later to tell me it was a “genetically normal baby girl” and had no other words since the usual comforts didn’t apply, and it occurred to me that I had no other memories of the summer except for the cloud that became the world so that even in the mirror there was only fog, and then the doctor said, “We can’t find the cause and there’s nothing else we can do, except maybe IVF but I doubt it would work,” and she went to fetch some papers while the med student beside her whom I’d barely noticed before, squeezed her hands excitedly and took the opportunity to say, “I find this all so fascinating!” and I found it all so strange that as a light goes out in one person, it ignites in another, and it seemed I had contributed to the circle of life. ​

Dear Mother, Yes, the glossy green and black tiled floor is sophisticated. Yes, the counters are bursting with baskets of roses and lilies and mums, all tied with coordinating silk ribbons. The air is so heavy with fragrance it could make a girl dizzy. But now there’s no pleasing Edith. At breakfast, she was dissatisfied with her soft-boiled egg and lukewarm tea. Even though she was not supposed to, she left lipstick stains on her cloth napkin and crumpled it by her plate. She says this flower shop, though small and brightly lit, with its cascade of daisies by the cash register, trumps all the gardens we toured yesterday. Because everything here is for sale.

(with Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey)
1991, for my mother

She can’t hold my hand once it starts, the metal-free room, the buzz and click of the machine. My small form, swallowed by the white tunnel, the pale, toothless snake. I am barely a bite.

She sits beside the MRI and reads aloud, the sound of her voice to keep me still. Today, she will not break open in the anxiety of me, her daughter, five years old and a cancer survivor. She opens Blueberries for Sal and reads as if we are snuggled in the upstairs twin bed, the peeling wallpaper and the maple tree breeze whispering into this cold, aseptic chamber:

“We will take our berries home and can them,” said her mother. “Then we will have food for the winter.”

Last winter, when the IV had slid into my small hand, I made not one sound. So brave, said the nurse, but it wasn’t bravery. I had endured these metal proddings for as long as memory. It’s not bravery if the pinch is expected, a part of what it costs to be alive.

Her mother walked slowly through the bushes, picking blueberries as she went and putting them in her pail. Little Sal struggled along behind, picking blueberries and eating every single one.

The garden we planted on a neighbor’s farm: onions, potatoes, three children digging in the dark mud, sun reddening my fair shoulders through a hand-me-down t-shirt, the hose water drunk which we would later learn was non-potable. So much can kill, yet so little does.

It was a mother crow and her children, and they stopped eating berries and flew away, saying, “Caw, Caw, Caw.”

What did my mother reply to the congregants at our church, to the fragile way they glanced at my thin blonde hair? The other children knew nothing of my scars. A six-year-old boy kissed me beneath a folding table; we held hands and promised to one day marry. How far away is the future to this boy? Can he guess the pain it takes to love someone this much?

Little Sal’s mother heard Little Bear tramping along behind and thought it was Little Sal. She kept right on picking and thinking about canning blueberries for next winter.

And when my brothers and I turn to beasts in the autumn leaves out back, when the cocker spaniel dives and chases and we are all one pack, will my mother notice the ferocity of life in my shy face? Always so many dishes, so many ​dirty clothes.

—a whole pail of blueberries and three more besides.