All the purples are up, so many purples. Loosestrife along the road and the dry creek beds. Chicory and self-heal. Echinacea in the backyard. Even the raccoon shit on the stones. August is purple. The blackberries copy the flowers, staining everything royal. My yard is bursting with berry bushes. Purple fingers and feet.
My nonagenarian great aunt Bea (great because she’s my grandmother’s sister and also because she’s GREAT) made something called a Roly Boly every summer when I was a kid. I’ve found nothing like it since — there’s a Roly Poly reference, but it’s not the same. I think she made it up (or her mother, or her grandmother, in the way of family recipes). It’s a dough-wrapped package of blackberries, boiled and eaten with milk and sugar. A delicious bowl of messy comfort, I pine for it still. I haven’t had a Roly Boly in at least forty years.
I remember Aunt Bea all those years ago, in long shorts and sleeveless button downs. The blackberries down by the road. I saw her earlier this summer and she said, “You have to make the Roly Boly, honey!” The way that she says — almost drawls — everything, punctuated always with “honey.” I have to make the Roly Boly. I say this to myself every summer — make the Roly Boly! Reclaim childhood pleasure! Share the thing you’ve rhapsodized about for a lifetime!
I stand before the backyard blackberry bushes, picking and eating, cursing the walls that keep me from the things I claim to want. What is stopping me? I make quick excuses — it’s too hot to cook (almost never), no time today (so much time), daunted by the task (she says it’s easy). The hard kernel of truth at the center of my hesitance is this: I don’t want to ruin it. I don’t want to sully the memory, the precious still of Aunt Bea’s summer table. Waiting for the Roly Boly, steam in the hot kitchen, corn and tomatoes, bare feet, hair like straw, prickle of sunned skin. Sweet tea and the long stretch of summer. Aunt Bea making a Roly Boly for me, “Just a minute, honey!” Slurp the swirl of creamy purple, down the stairs to the air-conditioned basement with the checkerboard carpet and the ping pong table to spin Frampton and swoon. Yes I think I feel like you do. 1976. Twelve years old, Roly Boly belly, I am coming alive. Summer childhood is irretrievable, locked in time. A bug in amber. A petrified berry.
I may yet make the Roly Boly but it will likely disappoint. It will not be the same and it won’t recover those attendant, unnameable tween feelings. There’s a bit of the twelve year old in me but my god she’s buried under so much. I fear the Roly Boly will not resurrect her but rather make her feel small and lost to the crush of time. And it will never taste like Aunt Bea’s. I’ve tried making my grandmother’s Christmas cookies, I know how this goes. Mine were pedestrian, diminishing the memory, making it all seem like so much summer morning fog, gone in the heat of the day.
The blackberries are starting to die on the vine. If I don’t pick them soon, they’re gone. And then I can’t (don’t have to) make the memory this year. Self-soothing self-sabotage.
Hang in,
Lisa
Things to share:
I try not to rave about politics here (with limited success), but I read Heather Cox Richardson every morning and Joyce Vance whenever she posts and would suggest that you do, as well. Not holding my breath, but could there be some light celebration ahead? Reasons for a champagne cocktail? Consequences?🤞🤞
I want to visit Toronto just for The Ministers of Cheese.
I’m reading a short, riveting book recommended by a friend (thanks H!) and you should read it immediately. The Fell by Sarah Moss is a pandemic novel(!) with exquisite tension and tenderness. I’m a slow reader and am not quite finished, but most of you will probably inhale it.
Catch the big moon and the Perseids!
I bought Tony Hoagland’s final poetry collection, Turn Up the Ocean, on the strength of this one poem. The book is as good as I’d hoped.
I Don’t Ask What You’re Thinking by Tony Hoagland
You carry buckets of water to the plum tree in the yard
and pull weeds for an hour—then sit down at the kitchen table
and fill out long complicated insurance forms; or on the phone,
argue with a Blue Cross representative named Brian
about a charge on the bill from last October.
When I watch you sweeping the back porch,
I can see that you are already looking
for the next thing to do.
It may be there are times when we cannot afford an inner life.
It may be there are times when it would be a big mistake
to “get in touch” with your feelings
because they’re big and dark and fatal, those feelings
like seaweed wrapped around the propeller of a ship
or a giant squid with great rubbery suction cups on its eighteen arms waiting for the chance to pull you down.
Even when I catch you in the late afternoon
staring at the sky, I don’t ask what you’re thinking.
I don’t want to interfere with the magnificent
discipline of your disconnection.
I feel like I am crouched down on my knees
looking through the round glass window in the door of the washing machine;
the dirty clothes churning around in there
furious and heavy, stained dark with the terribleness of life.
That’s what I imagine of your feelings.
The last thing we need
is to go in there and get close to them.
Those feelings are not really our friends—when
what we are trying to do is to go on living,
to have the strength to keep the outer world in order,
and to keep holding onto it;
to stand at the counter with a knife in your hand,
cutting the vegetables.
Gorgeous. Just gorgeous.