Twenty Minutes More

“How many more minutes to the bottom?”  A woman gripped her daughter’s hand.  The girl’s knee was mildly bloodied, the result, I was certain of a fall against rock.

I looked at my husband.  “Twenty minutes?”

He nodded.  “Yeah, about that.”

By all rights, we, too, should’ve been heading down the mountain at that hour.  At three o’clock in the afternoon, we were pointed in the wrong direction.

People climb Cadillac Mountain for a variety of reasons: Some attack the mountain, seemingly wanting to prove something to themselves or the other climbers, running up as fast as they can, stabbing feet and cleats and ski poles into the face of the mountain.  Others leisure their way up; stopping here and there to snap pictures of Bar Harbor posing prettily amid colorful boats in Frenchman’s Bay.  Some people, clearly ill, stagger and huff and crawl up the mountain, refusing the hand of a sister or a son waiting patiently a few steps ahead, and it’s these people who I hope make it to the top. 

But this day, we hurried up the mountain.

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The Permanence of Elephants

Like everything else of importance, the piano teacher’s home was on Main Street.  The house was small and painted a light gray and full of mystery and contradiction.  A huge magnolia tree shaded the path from the sidewalk to the three concrete steps leading to the porch.  Formed into the risers of the first step and the third were identical images of a fat elephant in profile.  I never knew how those elephants got there and never thought to ask.  My six year old self imagined that the elephants had been chiseled out by some former teenaged occupant of the house.  But my older self—my adult self—eventually realized that was unlikely: The images were too perfect; too uniform; too deep.  Perhaps a form was pressed into the concrete before it dried.  Perhaps the images were carved into wet cement the way my children would—years later—use a nail to carve their initials into the new concrete floor in my father’s equipment barn.  I will never know the story of how they got there, but those elephants were as much a part of the piano teacher’s house as the piano teacher’s house was a part of Main Street.

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Competition Over Blueberries

As soon as we hit the blueberry patch, the kids disperse:  Filibuster stealthily cases the entire patch until she finds the best row from which she picks only the choicest berries.  V disappears, watching people between branches, planning film scenes in her head, disdaining the people around her for their very humanity in the same way she so often distains herself.  And Squints?  When he finds a really good bush, he’ll shout out for the entire world to hear, “Mom! Dad! Come look at these berries! They’re amazing!”  But I won’t respond to his summons, not immediately.  Because I feel it’s my duty to pick a bush clean.  Even if there are other berries down the row that are perhaps a bit plumper, I can’t move on until I’ve gotten  all possible berries from the bush.  My husband stays beside me.  He claims it’s because I’m an expert, that he needs my guidance, but I think that he just wants to protect me from those dangerous blueberry-throwing men sometimes seen at this particular patch.  He picks slowly (he calls it deliberately), enjoying the nature that surrounds him.  We’ll pick in silence, listening to the birds and the conversations that float by as people head out to stake their own claims.

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Flirting Over Blueberries

When the first blueberry hit me, I assumed it had fallen from the branches.  It was a good crop that year.  The berries were as big as my thumb and so blue they were nearly black; all I had to do was run a hand along the branch and the berries would practically leap into my container with a rain of satisfactory little thumps that grew fainter as the container became full.  The branches were heavy with berries. The ground was littered with berries.  It was no wonder that one would land upon my head. 

The second berry hit me squarely in the back with uncommon velocity, as if the berry hadn’t fallen off the bush, but rather been shot from it. 

Or…had it been thrown?

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