Andrew Weeks says:

Thanks for posting this. Usually it’s hard to imagine fifty years with one person, but sometimes years with someone really do go by very quickly. So maybe it’s not so hard.

Anyways, I wanted to add a short story/memory I have.

There was this old couple that ran a blueberry operation on top of this big hill behind my grandparents farm where my dad grew up. They let my siblings and I sled on those blueberry hills during the winter, on fluffy slopes with views of the White Mountains and especially Mt. Washington looming just fifty miles to the north. The only memories I have of the “Mr. and Mrs. Blueberry” were of them waving from their white porch whenever we arrived. The old farm there was perched atop the very highest point of the hill, completely exposed to the elements, but with a nearly 360 degree view of central New Hampshire. Gorgeous place to live.

They were very old, and that’s all I knew about them. My dad used to say that they were old folks even when he was a kid. And after they passed away my grandfather had the audacity to claim that those two were old grumudguns when he was a youth, when he was running around the treeless hills, riding sleigh down roads hard packed with snow. Not a car in town.

Of course I didn’t believe him. He passed away a few years back at the age of 90. It was in mid-October, and on the day of his wake I went up around those hills to remind myself of days gone by. I went up through the woods behind my grandfather’s farm house and eventually came upon the blueberry fields and finally up to the very top of the hill.

At the peak of the steep, brown and red short bush blueberry fields, there was the farm house and barn with their paint peeling very badly. I was worried, but I clambered up and through the windows I peeked and everything was still, and clean and complete. As if someone had just left for town to get some bread for supper. Everything inside was ol’ fashioned, appliances were all human powered and made of metal or wood. The beds were covered in old quilts, but perfectly tucked in and folded. There were perfectly placed turkey feathers in a vase, and I had to peer past beautiful blue and green, ancient bottles in the window sills. Everything was almost like a museum of a New England farm house, and even though I’m sure that that old couple was very neat and tidy, I could tell they must have passed away. There was nothing to prove it, nothing to put your finger on, but it felt like they must have died some years back. Even though no one was within at least a mile to see me, I felt like a snoopy neighbor invading someone’s memories, and soon walked on.

I walked down the far side of the hill, the cold side, north, towards the pyramid of Mt. Washington, already covered in blanket of snow in mid October. There was a cemetery down there I had never been to and I wanted to check it out. I jogged down the step embankment startling a raven or a large crow perched in the only tree in the field, long since dead, probably an old sugar maple that marked a boundary. Or at least that’s what I thought. The cemetery had a thick, low granite boundary, made with the most massive pieces of rock you’ve ever seen. I can’t even begin to imagine how you would move something like that in place, hundreds of years ago.

Pink, green, grey and even bluish lichen spotted and at some points covered the granite boundary, and the grave stones as well. Lichen is not a single thing really. It’s a relationship between two distinct and separate entities, intertwined into a singularity. One is either a blue-green bacteria or a green algae and the other is a fungus. The bacteria or algae absorbs and processes the sunlight into energy using photosynthesis, and the fungus sucks up water and literally eats the minerals on the rocks where it resides.

Lichens can be found almost all over the world, in the most inhospitable places, and all due to this relationship between two very distinct and different creatures. Many scientists argue that this is a codependent relationship. But contrarily, just as many experts say that the fungus has the bacteria or algae imprisoned with, in a strictly parasitic relationship. They argue that the bacteria/algae would do fine on it’s own but is being keenly used by the fungus.

The lichen is mostly crunchy to touch. Depending on the type, stripped lichen can sometimes take a year to three years per inch to grow back. This is something I thought of while walking along the border, crunching and squishing it beneath me.

Whereas the fields outside the boundary were red with dead blueberry leaves, and brittle and dry; within the cemetery the ground was completely covered in mosses and things that look like mosses but aren’t true mosses but actually something called a liverwort. There were little pink flowers, with fat, hungry bumble bees passing between them, seemingly indecisive. I wondered where they would go tonight when it was sure to frost. So small and vulnerable to the freezing highland-meadow nights here.

I walked around the old, granite grave stones, some of which were completely unintelligible, and some which had their words sunk into the wet mosey earth, bent at odd angles like they were rocks melting by the eons. Whereas most of the graves had long since started to sink, and which I avoided stepping on, there was one fresh stone with two human sized lumps of earth before it. These two fresh patches of earth were covered completely in the tiny pink flowers, and bees were having a hedonistic, roman-style orgy amongst them. Mad with excitement at all the tasty nectar and pollen blessedly condensed onto this one spot in an increasingly barren fall environment.

I crouched into the bee filed air near enough to read the engravement. It was easy to read. It had two names, but with both sharing their last. The last name was the name of the hill, which I won’t write here to preserve privacy. I don’t remember their first names now, but I did then back in 2006 and the names on that grave were the names of the old couple that lived on that blueberry farm and which now lay before me. I was dumbfounded then to read that the “Mrs. Blueberry” had been born in 1901 and equally surprised to read that the Mr. had been born only two years later. It showed their deaths as 2001 and 2003 respectively. And below that it stated:

Married 86 years.

I sat down against the lichen covered stone wall, bees smacking mistakenly into me like I was a wilted flower. It was one of those autumn days in New England where the wind is chilly and sharp, but the sun is shinning hard and you don’t know if you are too cold or too hot.

I couldn’t make out whether the feeling that filled me was only pure jealousy or whether I was horrified at the simplicity of their lives. I suspect both. I would have never be able to attain that type of life, or at least I’ve lost my chance now I suppose. So I can only wonder now how it would be. But I’ll never know.

Anyways, you just got me thinking about growing up in Maine and NH, and all the relics of past times all around us. Some of which are living amongst us still!

- Thanks!

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