The Berry Pickers

by Amanda Peters

There is a code among the dying: let the living speak. They have longer to atone for it.

Late October brings a chill. In the mornings, even in the house, before the fire started, you could see your breath on the air. But it wasn’t the depressing grey chill of November. I think the trees, all afire with orange and red leaves, made the chill bearable. My favourites were the ones that looked like they glowed gold when the sun hit them just right. As we passed them, I rolled down the window and tilted my head and squinted just to see if I could make them glow even more.

I don’t know if he became “no good” before or after he left. She never told any stories about before, only the ones where he left and didn’t return. A year after he left, Aunt Lindy took all the photos she had of him and lined the floor of the outhouse with them.

Hmmm...good way to deal with photos of the ex!

It’s something I had a hard time reconciling, my father making himself small for them. “People will be someone other than themselves if they have people who rely on them,” Mae said on one of those mornings I sat by my stump to watch the sun rise.

How true this has been throughout history.

I lived my entire childhood in the shadow of infant ghosts. Their memory haunted my mother, and she carried them around with her, constantly tripping over their absence and blaming me for the fall.

Fate is a trickster. He likes to set up all the clues just to see if you can put them together and make sense out of things you never thought to make sense of in the first place.

So very true.

There was love in that house, but none of us really knew what to do with it.