All around the mulberry tree...
My family has never owned their own house. When I was little we hopped from apartment to apartment every few years, each one slightly nicer than the last but still not ours.
My mother and father were both very outdoorsy people when I was young. They loved growing in our tiny garden on the side of the apartment building. Eventually, when I was six, we rented out a garden plot in the next town over. Weekend mornings were spent in the garden, where I would run around the surrounding plots, stealing a flower here and there.
In the center of the garden plots was an enormous mulberry tree. The day we discovered it was heavy with deep purple fruits was nearly magical. For the rest of the season I’d climb up the low branches to the best fruit and fill yogurt containers with the sweet berries that tasted not quite like raspberries and not quite like grapes. We’d sprinkle them over our cereal in the morning, I think we even tried to make a pie once. Mostly, I’d sit on the edge of the plot with my tiny buckets of mulberries and munch until my fingers and mouth were stained red.
I was completely unknowing then of how different my life would be in fifteen years. My parents would lose time for the garden, and grow apart from each other like vines searching for their own light. My dad would leave this world too soon, while I was thousands of miles away. The house with the beautiful garden out back would be a dream we were all still reaching for, long after the berry stains were gone from my fingers.
I discovered that my walk to work in the city is lined with mulberry trees. My inner child begs me to reach out to them and pluck the fruit from its branches. My twenty-one year old self refuses. Not because I doubt that they are the same fruits I used to love, but because I don’t think they’ll ever taste so sweet again.
