Twenty years of blueberries

I wrote this piece for my Creative Writing Nonfiction class last spring. It's always been one of my favorites! We had to write about a place that gives us contentment. 

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This year is our twentieth year at Camp. Our twentieth year. As much as I bring it up at every meal, at every pause in a conversation, no one seems to understand the gravity of this statement with my emphasis on “twenty.” Every year since I was born, my grandparents rent a house on Lake Winnipesaukee. Even though we live about five minutes away from the lake, to stay in a cabin all the way over in Moultonborough is still a special treat and everyone can’t wait for that third week in July—the week that we call “Camp.”  While the first year was only my grandparents, my parents, my mom’s brother and his wife, and me (a one-month old baby), my brother, sister, and two cousins have joined us in the ensuing years to make it a group of eleven.

I can’t pretend that every day of every year we’ve ever been at Camp has been wonderful. We’ve certainly had terrible weather, temper tantrums, sibling turmoil, searing sunburns, and occasional sickness, there’s never a moment when someone isn’t counting down the days until we pack up four cars and one boat before heading off to Camp. Wild blueberry bushes, pine pitch trails, rickety clotheslines, and those dreaded seventies couches wait for us every year. It’s all been there for the past twenty years (in case you’ve already forgotten the number).

I. The blueberry bushes

I reach for another handful of those deliciously sweet blue things. I’m a little over a year old—harnessed into the backpack on my dad while he picks the wild blueberries and lifts them up to my sticky, warm hand. I stuff them into my mouth for what must be the hundredth time that afternoon. Mom warns Dad that I might be reaching my blueberry limit. Dad calls back to say, “okay!” but still hands me a few when she’s not looking. My belly is bloated and I feel slightly ill, but nothing can stop me from leaning against the constraints of the backpack straps to reach another nearby bush, ready for the picking.

II. The kitchen

“Is this enough?” I hold up a cup of sugar over the bright orange mixing bowl, looking up at Grammy. She smiles and nods her head as she helps Emily, now five years old, measure the flour. I dump the overflowing cup into the bowl and reach my hand over the counter to sneak a few blueberries.

“Hey, now those are for the muffins!” Grammy doesn’t even look over. How did she know what I was trying to do? I needed to work on my stealth. At nine years old I thought I was pretty sneaky, but Grammy had some tricks of her own, apparently. Walking over and wiping off flour on the apron Emily and I made for her last year, she comes to read me what’s next on the recipe.

III. The living room

            The couch has yellow and tangerine checkers. The rug is mustard-colored—or at least we hope that was the original color and that it didn’t just “turn” mustard over time. Even the chairs are mismatched furniture that none of us would ever buy for as living room in the 2000s. After the nightly “sunset cruise” we take around the lake, everyone piles into the living room, a slice of pie and ice cream in one hand and a good book in the other. We leave the windows open to listen to the loons while Papa and Dad read newspapers, Auntie Diane reads her magazine, Grammy and Mom read what seems like a bunch of “boring books” to me. Emily and I are reading Harry Potter even though I should be starting on my summer reading homework for seventh grade next month.

            “What was that? I think I hear one!” Papa sets down his newspaper and Grammy gets up to stand by the window. We all set our books down and listen, ears straining to hear the call of the loon and the answer from another.

IV. The boat

I squint harder in the sunlight, my sunburned cheeks facing upward as I try to balance my book above me while still laying on my back. The problem is the combination of the bright summer sun, my arms get tired from holding my book above my head, and it’s hard to flip pages when they all start falling down when I lose my grip on the left side of the book.

The boat rocks back and forth, back and forth as the midday waves of the cove woosh woosh woosh against the side of the boat. I sit, or lay, on the back, skin upturned toward the glaringly bright sky, lightly covered in a sad amount of sunscreen—something my mom would most certainly shake her head at.

“Megaaaaaaan!” Oh no. Here she comes. My mom ambles out of the tiny lake house that surprisingly holds eleven people.

“Mom I can’t hear you… these waves are too loud…”

“Put this on. Your cheeks are already on fire.” She tosses a greasy bottle of Banana Boat down to me and it hits the floor of the boat and the cap pops open. Grumbling, I shake a little bit of the sliminess on my arms, careful not to get it on my new bikini. Rolling myself back over to my book, I grin and resume the cheap love story that has consumed me for the majority of the afternoon.

***

Whether I’m sitting through Spanish class, running at field hockey practice, finishing up an essay, doing various tasks at work, I’m always thinking about the next appointment on the schedule, the ensuing classes I’ll take next semester, or even the next time I’ll get a haircut. There’s always something to think about and there’s definitely something I can worry about, whether or not it needs my worrying—and normally my thoughts are focused on questions that are completely out of my control. One of the places where anxiety vanishes is amidst the sounds of jet-skis during the day and loons at night. Contentment is found with my boisterous family playing cards on the picnic tables at dusk or snorkeling around the beach during the heat of the day. A sort of contentment that disregards slight sunburns and family bickering, but reminds me that if I had the choice to go anywhere in the entire world, there is no place I’d rather be then laying on hot leather seats, struggling to hold up my story, only to finally set it down and listen with closed eyes to the thump of the waves hitting the boat and rocking it back and forth, back and forth.