Berries/Holiday closure

The Passage will close after today for a holiday pause, until January 5, 2021.

I think, as a year I never anticipated draws to a close, of Seamus Heaney's well-known poem.

Blackberry Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

  "You ate that first one" was January, 2020 with its fresh-start snap, the return to work and routine. We made plans. But within a month, "when the bath was filled we found a fur". Like Heaney, we dropped into a queasiness that began when a friend told me, at the end of February, that she and her husband had cancelled a long-anticipated trip on the day of their departure. They were slightly ahead of the curve, alerted by a family member with a life-science background.

TThen came the sourness, the fear, the sense that "it wasn't fair"— and a plunge into the bleak final couplet. But this disappointment is presaged by the first line of the stanza: "We hoarded the berries in the byre". The assonance contains a truth: bounty ought to be shared. (My first thought was, "Heaney, make some jam.")

A Blackberry season will return soon, perhaps not as bountiful as the best year, but enough. We will rejoice, feel vast relief, revel, fill our cans. 

And yet, I do not want to wholly forget this year, with its lessons of the fragility and impermanence embedded in nature—including human nature. Ten months of watching acts both of generosity and soul-crushing meanness, loneliness and determined connection: crisis reveals what we're made of. 

Instead of resolutions for the new year, I will review of how I acted, and how I wish to carry on even when the berries bud again.

To everyone, I wish you a peaceful and restorative pause before a new year. 

Thank you for reading, especially during a time when we've had to restrict our usual contacts.

T