Raspberry

July 1979. My brother and I are restless and making noise in the living room of Baba’s small house in town, wrestling and poking at each other. We are too hot inside, the stove has been throwing off heat all day. Baba and Auntie Mary are showing my mom how to make Saskatoon berry perogies, and we’ve been banished from the kitchen. We’re still making our presence known, in the annoying way that small children do, when Auntie strides in and hands us two empty Becel containers.

‘Hey you two. We need some raspberries. The driveway bushes are full, can you fill these up? We can have them with ice cream after dinner. I wonder who can pick the most?’

She winks. We’re out the screen door in a flash, filling our mouths faster than the bright yellow tubs, the berries are hot in the prairie sun. My shoulders turn as pink as my fingers.

June 1986. My mom asks what kind of cake I want for my birthday. I insist on raspberry delight, a kind of deconstructed cheesecake casserole with raspberry Jell-o, two kinds of cream (whipped and sour), and a graham crust. I am a teenager and do not know that raspberries are at least a month off from being ready. My mom, the world’s worst cook, makes it anyway using frozen bricks of raspberries, and it becomes a birthday tradition that continues long after I move away from home. Raspberry delight tastes like unconditional love.

July 1997. I’m in a back alley in Whitehorse, walking to a friend’s place. It’s a perfect summer day, pure white puffball clouds lazily making their way across a bright blue sky, thin pines tower in clusters on the clay cliffs surrounding the town. There’s electric pink fireweed everywhere and it’s nearly four feet tall. Giant ravens caw and cackle, and the fine pebbles covering the sidewalk sound and feel like sandpaper underfoot. Every sense is heightened.

I take what I think will be a shortcut through a back alley. Raspberry bushes lining the sides of the alley, enormous and full of fruit. The berries are huge, the size of supermarket grapes, and so plentiful the canes are half bent with them. I furtively glance left and right, and then pick a giant handful. The taste makes me homesick and gleeful in equal measure. I eat so many that I am late to my friend’s.

August 2013. My husband’s cousin Kate gifts us three ever-bearing raspberry canes and I buy the most enormous pots for them. I plant the little sticks standing straight up, in the best soil I can buy, and they look so small and fragile. I wonder if I’ve done it right, and why there aren’t any leaves. I have not yet learned about the strength and tenacity of raspberries, nor can I imagine how much sweeter the berries will be for having grown in my own little yard. I have not yet learned that each ever-bearing cane bears fruit for only one summer, nor that the act of bearing transforms them into floricanes. I do not yet know that in this process they die, making way for new growth. I have not yet learned that it will be my job to prune the old and the dead to make way for the new, nor that it will take a decade for me to fully understand the terrible beauty of the floricane’s message.

September 2015. The last time I see my father other than on his deathbed, I take him out for a walk, pushing his wheelchair. We go a long way that day, the weather as fine as any September has ever offered, the clouds high and the faint smell of leaves turning colour teasing the summer out. I push him down Olive street, and turn the corner onto High. We go past the armoury and cross Chippewa, and just seeing the old high school gives me an idea. ‘Wanna go into the woods Dad? Down to the creek?’

‘I don’t mind,’ he says, but I know this means he’d love to. For a man who spent two decades working in Northern Manitoba and another two travelling to every small community in Northern Ontario, he hasn’t been in the woods since he entered long term care.

I’ve underestimated the challenge of off-roading with a wheelchair meant for linoleum covered hallways, not gravel trails. I use my whole body’s weight to slow us as we hurtle down a hill much steeper than I remember it being. At the bottom I’m already worried about how we’re going to make it back. I’m covered in sweat, my heart is racing, and I pull us over to the side of the trail, right by the creek.

And then, like magic, I see a treasure before me: a dozen bright red raspberries on a wild bush covered with hundreds of the little dried white cones left on the canes when the fruit is picked. They fall into my hand when I touch them, and I offer my open palm to my father. We share them, his eyes shine.

‘How great thou art’, he warbles, the first line of his favourite hymn. It is a perfect moment, the last real memory we will make together. My eyes well up, and I hug him before turning to face the hill homeward. He is gone to his maker less than two weeks later.

July 2016. I’m sleepwalking through the grief of my brother’s recent death with generous doses of white wine, french pastry and regular cranio-sacral massages with a wild creative force named Georgia. I’m not covered for these treatments, and not working, so she offers a barter. I trade her my dead brother’s two tree hammocks, his hanging sleeping bag, and finally one of my potted raspberry bushes. I hope that she can tend it in ways I have failed to do. The weight of my neglectfulness hangs around me like a storm cloud of self-blame. I have not yet learned that the berries and my brother were always yearning for a life much wilder, much freer, than they were offered. The container of my care was simply insufficient.

July 2023. It’s hard to find raspberries this year at the farm stands, and the ones I do find are expensive, and quick to mold. It has been a wet summer, great for the seven new trees planted in our yard, but as it turns out not ideal for berry farmers.

It is the second year in a row I’m not going to make it out to pick. Last summer I was helping my mom across the threshold, a July full of grief and gratitude for the great love she showed me every day of her life. This summer I’m doing my best to curl my toes into the sand on this side of the rushing Styx. I can see the water in front of me, tumbling over the rocks of this illness and the absolute unpredictability of happenstance. This river is chaotic, hypnotic, a powerful force that will drag anyone along who finds themselves a step too deep into it.

In this moment though, in this year, I’m tuning myself to what is on this side, to the whisper of the cool breeze in the tall oak trees, to the warm grains of age old rock worn to fine sand that hold me up and blanket the bedrock beneath. I’m tuning myself to the smell of coming rain, to the wheeling red-tailed hawk leaning a wing towards the mountain’s brow, to the memory of raspberries warm on my tongue and the promise of next year’s harvest.