Learning to ride, falling down, getting back on
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Debra Gwartney is waiting patiently in western Oregon for her favorite day of summer: when the blueberries are ripe for picking. She’ll pop some straight in her mouth — still warm from the sun — and the rest will be made into a pie.
The author’s husband, Barry Lopez, sifts through the ashes of his burned archive.
My husband had been sick long enough, a string of years, that I’d begun to think of his diagnosis as a rumor. He was interminably terminally ill. Until he wasn’t.
I couldn’t see the loaves in her oven, but I could smell them. They smelled like the perfect weight of blankets on a winter night; like the loving and attentive parents I thought I deserved; like the solution to every natty problem that might crop up in life.