The Mystery of Trees and Teaching

Wading knee deep in snow, strange here on the west coast, summer suddenly returns as I pass the buried blackberry patch: their hot smell, the children, mouths purple, eating as fast I pick, boiling our meager gathering with sugar in the big jam pot to pour over ice cream. How simple, how sweet, the memory. It tugs on another and Mary Oliver’s poem of a green summer shifts the white landscape once again:

Answers

If I envy anyone it must be
My grandmother in a long ago
Green summer, who hurried
Between kitchen and orchard on small
Uneducated feet, and took easily
All shining fruits into her eager hands.

That summer I hurried too, wakened
To books and music and circling philosophies.
I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers
That could not solve the mystery of the trees.

My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.
Smiling, in faulty grammar,
She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career:
So to please her I studied - but I will remember always
How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled
All the wild sauces of the brimming year. 

I think of this long ago grandmother smiling at her granddaughter, purple-stained hands scarred from thorny picking, tidying sticky pots, spoiled fruit, the lines in her face evidence of who knows what: sleepless nights, quarrels over money, worries over a wild child who broke her heart, aching loneliness for the home of her childhood.

We long for these green summers of our imagined memories, the messiness blanketed like fresh snow, muffled, muted. We strain to build lives as tidy, to teach so that all confusion is poured out of our classrooms and the children, shining fruit, sitting straight, hands folded, neatly labeled, smile and nod.

Yet the mystery of trees, of grandmothers, of love, of teaching remains.

And it, too, is beautiful.