Berry Sandwich
A berry berry berry good sandwich
As a kid I climbed mulberry trees and ate so many berries my fingers turned purple. There was a stretch of land behind my grandma’s house in the middle of the city, Cedar Falls, Iowa, where the old farm still grew strawberries. We would sneak into this patch and pick the ripest red ones we could find.
There’s something about berries and their abundance that has always brought peace.
I remember when Nasim first came to New Orleans, how we would walk two blocks from my house and fill up on loquats. How we would drive, spot a tree, and stop in the middle of some Uptown street to pick as many as we could. We ate mulberries from the tree in my backyard, and after she left, I froze some of these berries and would add them to oatmeal. I sold four quarts for 56 US dollars.
In the Chinatown of Toronto yesterday, she paid six Canadian dollars for eight giant loquats, but we found mulberries and we found more serviceberries and I thought how these might be planted in every college campus, in high schools, in old folks’ homes, in any place where there might be joy and sustenance that came from the picking.
It’s hard to find a place in the city quiet enough to record a seven-minute story. Even the far reaches of the mall, past closed clothing shops and food courts no longer in use, there would be a door opening and closing. There would be the loud voices of those entering. Slurping of straws.
We left this mall, walked hand in hand down sidewalks and past houses with manicured front lawns, Japanese Maples with purple leaves, pines shaped to look even more like triangles, and a giant milkweed with purple flowers. Old trees, comparatively speaking, honey locusts and maples and oaks, spots of the sidewalk shaded.
“I have a feeling there will be somewhere to record near water,” I told her.
We walked on past people with dogs and a mom pulling her boy in a wagon. She saw the park before I did.
“There’s water,” she said.
A pitcher, one hundred meters (for the Canadians) high, with water flowing over the top and onto a grated ground below was the centerpiece at the entrance to this park with swings and a jungle gym. A deeper part of the park where all the grass had been replaced with astroturf, a mother watched one son climb while another reclined in a stroller.
“Baby.” Nasim took my hand. She led me to branches holding mulberries.
There weren’t that many compared to the last couple of days. We picked what we could and then I pointed out more trees on the other side of a fence.
We ate more berries.
“Record,” she said. “In case we get kicked out.”
As I recorded the story of the day before a man came into the courtyard with a bottle of white wine. He filled a tumbler glass. A friend in a walker joined him. The first man took a lighter from his pocket and an inhaler from the other and put these on the iron grated table.
Nasim whispered in my ear. “What if they turn us in?”
“I’ll tell him I got video. Smoking. Drinking at two in the afternoon. I’ll report him to the board of this old folks home.”
The men did not turn us in. They drank their wine and we picked our berries and I again said how these trees should be mandatory in all places where lawns spread, how no work would have to be done, how quickly the trees grew, how seedlings could be moved from one spot to the next. For the future.
On our way back out the fence, we found the mothership, a white mulberry, the ones that stay white with a tinge of purple, the ones that are so sweet they, too, could be used in oatmeal, the ones that brought us both memories of the first time we danced, of the first time we shared dried mulberries in that sixth floor unit on King Street West.
It was our first year together. I invented the berry sandwich. We had mulberry season twice. In two different cities. And she pointed out that I sometimes say neat.
