Summer.
It’s flying past at an alarming rate now, and it doesn’t even really feel as though we’re in it: too cool; too dry; little growing; leaves already turning. These are the wages of climate change, of short-term profits for the forces of colonialism and of impoverishment of the earth that keeps us alive.
What hurts most, I think is what is not here: fields once lush with the best hay in the county now half-browned, spots fully bare; no garden, for lack of warmth and water and time now, too; few flowers, even the annuals not having survived the cold aridity of the early weeks; and the lack of any midsummer sweetness, the wild strawberries and pineberries having surrendered their spirits half a decade ago now.
We still have the raspberry patch, which thus far has managed to produce three red raspberries this season, none of them quite ripe. Even that is a product of Wings’s dedicated work, trying to keep everything still here in healthy condition — failing that, alive, at least. It’s harder than it sounds, and he works in rotation, mostly in the evenings to maximize the water’s effect. But it’s well water, not irrigation flow, and we are faced with the all-too-real possibility that we may never have the latter again.
When even the red willows are dying at an alarming rate? The very plant, medicine, spirit for which place and people are named?
It’s hard to hold any long-term sense of hope now.
And yet, as I have noted so many times before in so very many places and spaces and contexts, hope is a stubborn thing. It’s aided, of course, by memory, and by the human tendency to refuse any form of the word no: We are uniquely capable of convincing ourselves that the evidence before us means nothing compared to what our memory shows us. We are no different; in both of our memories live images of beautiful summers filled with warmth and water and light and all the sweetness of the wild strawberries that in my language are called heartberries.
Now, that’s the only place they can be found — memory, heart.
Hope is what lives in the heart, hope, and remembrance, and all the sweet beauty of home, regardless of whether we were granted the gift of inhabiting it for any length of time.
Heart and memory are inextricably intertwined, and the older we grow, the more we understand the truth of it. It’s fodder for a heedless hope, yes, but perhaps also inspiration to work for their return . . . of the warmth and the water and the light of summer, and of the sweetness of the wild strawberries, the fruits of the heart.
~ Aji
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