Thinking on ... Labor Day

About women's bodies, dance, children, this planet, and sweetness

Been thinking about work a lot lately—my WIP, a dance and health anthology, is called Body of Work—which led me to think of the art of physical exertion and of labor, and of women’s labor in particular, and of my mother, and of this short piece I wrote a few years back.

Today is Labor Day here in the U.S, where my husband is working in his garden, lined by red raspberry vines, which are just starting to come into their own.

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Berries for My Mother: A Triptych

If the blackberries lost any sweetness from the pinpricks of blood let while ten-year-old me pulled them from their thorny vines into my shirt hem, I don’t remember. Fingertips stained through the summer. Snacks weren’t plenty in the house, where carob made a sad substitute for chocolate. But the berries along the back fence, near the chicken barn and vegetable garden, were plenty and free. Did she love anything more than berries and cream? (Us three, by a slim margin maybe.) Simple bliss she didn’t need to cajole—or even buy at the discount grocery store in town, tallying the cost on the plastic ticker she carried with her up and down the aisles.

The red raspberries hung on well into autumn here last year, past Halloween, maybe even approaching Thanksgiving. The world is warming—its waters rising—and with it this bayside place. God’s most tender fruits, little constellations of teeth-aching sugar, are confused. My husband’s strawberry plants were washed away earlier this spring with too much rain and nowhere to go. Can’t siphon the water to another planet, not yet. And once we can, that place better have berries, sweet and soft, warmed by the sun or whatever star grows the things on Planet Maybe or Planet Perhaps.

Whatever you do, don’t make a raspberry sauce or a raspberry vinaigrette, a la the 1990s! No fruit on the bottom to be stirred. No jam or jelly. Try the naked berries on for size, instead. On an earlobe, like a cluster of rubies. Let your lover bite it off. Or tip your fingers with the berries for polish, like you did when you were a kid. Is there a more beautiful color? Not blood red or audacious cherry, but more mauve, like her lips kissed by the sun. Eat them in the garden rows. Toss them to the sky that hasn’t fallen yet. Catch them on your summer tongue and let them melt. Make a childhood of them. Make her last forever. Wonder that such sweetness still exists.