Mulberries

On the drive into Cooperstown the roadside is decorated with orange day lilies, blue corn flower, and white Queen Anne’s lace, all about knee or thigh high. At ankle height there are yellow coltsfoot. The mullen, with its floppy pale green leaves and its spire of yellow florettes has risen to shoulder height. There are vivid black eyed susans, purplish pink clover, yellow buttercups, yellow green cow parsnips, and more and more. It’s a time of plenty, more flowers and grasses and shrubs than I can name, more bird song than I can identify, and the rich scent of growth everywhere. Summer is in full swing.

At the Farmers’ Market there is abundance and variety. This week, the first of the raspberries, red and tiny sweet black ones. And beside them, mulberries. How could I resist? The raspberries carry Amenia memories, but the mulberries speak to me of The Bronx. The apartments we lived in were built around the perimeter of a block, and the interior was all gardens and paved walkways. One of the gardens featured mulberry trees, and I can smell them, see their red stains on the pavement, on my hands, on my clothes. I can feel them, warm and plump in my fingers. Did we pick them in the spring, before we started spending our summer time in Amenia?

Those gardens were a joy. Because they were completely protected from the streets, we could play there unsupervised, even when we were quite young. At our end of the courtyard there had been a huge pool, an eight pointed concrete star with a big rock pile in the center which had once housed a fountain. My mother remembered the pool filled with water and the fountain running in her childhood, but by the time we were born it was dry, just the empty concrete bed to climb down into and the dry pile of rocks to climb up on. I don’t know why they gave up on filling the pool, cost perhaps, or safety. Although if safety was the issue, I wonder why they didn’t fill it in with dirt. We certainly risked falls onto that hard concrete as we walked bravely along the rim.

I was so safe there. But the last of the people who made my world so safe died eight years ago, my Dad. My Mom is gone nine years, Shayne 15, and my sweet Bubbe, Goldie, died nearly 42 years ago, when I was pregnant with Liz. It’s my turn to be Bubbe now, but there’s not much I can do to make the world safe for my grandchildren. I know the world is even less safe for me just now than it is for them, but up here on the hill it’s hard to remember that it isn’t safe. The grass and wildflowers that surround us hold no threat – except for ticks. The trees that I can see in detail at the edge of our property hold no threat, nor do the miles of trees that blur together on the ridges that recede from view to the southeast. When everything I can see is so benign, it’s hard to remember the unseen threat.

But at the Farmers’ Market everyone is masked, and we make our circuits in the same direction, no longer wandering about checking on who has the nicest looking eggplant or the first raspberries. I met Carole LeChance, my wonderful aqua aerobics instructor at the market, and we did exchange a few words. But the social atmosphere of the market is mostly gone for now, and I miss it. I know this is a temporary change, and it’s far, far less disruptive for us than it is for so many millions of people. We can socialize safely outside in the few remaining months of warm weather, and the things we miss are pretty high on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We didn’t have jobs to lose, and no one can evict us. We don’t have to wait in line for food boxes or wake in a cold sweat wondering how we can pay for a Covid 19 test.

In many ways, Goldie and my Mom and Dad built this safety for me. They lived in a system that favored them, that gave them earning opportunities and the chance to build equity. And I stand on their favored shoulders, safely looking out over property I own. There’s no fairness to it. I picked mulberries with Charlotte Dickerson, the child of one of the few Black families left in the Coops out of the idealistic Communists who built those workers’ coops with my Grandfather. Those Communists planted the beautiful gardens, the safe places for children to play, they built the basement classrooms for adults to learn in. They were, if not color blind, open to building a racially mixed future, where the color of your ideology mattered more than the color of your skin. But I doubt that the doors that opened for me, for education, for jobs, for credit, opened as easily for Charlotte. We were equally skilled at picking mulberries and making messes of our clothes. We were equally fearless about walking the rim of the empty concrete pool. I would love to think that she is comfortably buying mulberries in a Farmers’ Market now, or having them delivered from Whole Foods. But if she is, it’s because she beat the odds, not because they favored her.