Liz Busby
I received the bareroot blueberry bushes in late fall. Ordinary blueberry bushes, those you might buy at your local Home Depot, come in gallon containers of dirt with little perlite bubbles, a group several twigs a foot and a half high covered in leaves, and small, bell shaped white flowers which will one day become blueberries. Bareroot bushes are nothing like that. If you dropped a bareroot blueberry bush on a hiking trail, it would soon be lost, indistinguishable from the twigs and branches fallen around the path. The only difference between this bush and a twig is that these so-called bushes branch both at the bottom and the top. The top branches are longer, more continuous, whereas the lower branches (actually the roots) are short and stubby. Neither the roots or branches have any secondary branching, no complexity here, just 2-3 long, straight twigs on top, and 4-5 short twigs on bottom.
They came in a cardboard box, like the dozens of others that show up at our house every month, usually with Amazon logos. Instead, this time after ripping through the brown packing tape, I open the box to find these three longish not-quite twigs, not-quite branches—my bareroot blueberry bushes—packed with some brown paper to fill up the extra space.
It doesn’t seem possible that they could live again. To my eyes, they might as well be kindling. But the online nursery’s tag assures me that, yes, indeed, these are blueberry bushes, and if planted the following way, they will indeed awaken:
First, dig a hole.
It’s not easy here in the Pacific Northwest. Once you get past the two inches of topsoil put down by the builders, it’s solid clay. I slam my six-foot shovel into the ground only to have it bounce back at me. It feels like digging straight into bedrock. After an afternoon of pounding at the ground to no result, I finally let my feminist pride go and ask my husband to dig me some holes. He finishes them in about 30 minutes.
Second, fill most of the hole back in again.
The holes need to be deeper than the roots of the bareroot plant to create a gradual transition between the soft, permeable topsoil and the clay underneath. The clay is in fact full of nutrients that the plants need, a Pacific Northwest gardening book informs me, but they are packed too tightly to be accessible. Neither roots nor water can easily make their way through this clay layer which sits like a Northface raincoat spread just underneath my backyard. To compensate for this, I mix peat moss with some of the removed soil, creating a permeable layer about halfway up the hole.
Third, create support for the roots.
Once, these plants were growing like any other plant in the ground. Before being shipped to me, they were rudely removed from the soil, cut back to the bare essentials of their being. Without the intertwining of roots and soil, these plants have nothing left to stand on, no inherent support. So I build a cone of compacted soil and arrange the roots around it like a debutant arranging her curls, taking thought to the placement of each strand. Of course, the plant will still not stand on its own, precariously balanced like a 13-year-old in her first high heels. Working with an awkward mix of hurry and diligence, I try to hold the three-foot-high branches straight with one hand and backfill in garden soil from a bag with the other. As soil begins to settle on the roots, the bush becomes more, well, rooted in place.
Then pack down the soil a little to hold the bush in place, creating a divot that will direct water towards the roots.
Finally, wait for spring.
At the start of the new year I sit at my computer desk in our playroom cum office, watching the water puddle by the blueberry bushes in our backyard. The standing water can’t be good for the roots, but I’m not sure, and I don’t know what to do about it even if it is.
Turning back to my computer, I look at my pages and spreadsheets of New Year’s resolutions, wondering. Is it time yet to turn back into a writer? I had quietly put the writer away, even before I became a mother. When I became pregnant with our first child, I felt as though I was drowning. No, not drowning because that would be dramatic and decisive; it was more like walking through a wetland, soggy and miserable. I sleepwalked through my senior capstone course on religious poetry, throwing up every morning on my way to class. Trying to make sense out of T.S. Eliot was even more like swimming through a lake full of weeds than usual. My final paper was the nonsense of a freshman writer, disconnected arguments grasping at reeds, signifying nothing. Only months before, I had submitted essays and won two different contests. My once-clear thoughts had submerged in thick sludge.
I figured it would pass, but the promised relief of the second trimester never arrived. I continued to feel constantly sick, unable to do more than strictly necessary for life. I graduated and dropped all semblance of literary life, descending into HGTV and endless turns of Sid Meier’s Civilization.
When our first child was born, it was like breaking the surface of the water after a deep dive. I took in a full breath of air for the first time in nine months. I could eat again. But even as our baby turned out to be a great sleeper and life settled into an easy pattern, I couldn’t write again.
I studied all sorts of things on infant development, laid out ridiculously complex schemes for feeding a baby solid food, for organizing toys, for rotating different sizes of clothing. But my creative instinct wasn’t there anymore. I had plenty of ideas, but no energy to execute them.
In desperation to save my sinking self, I applied to a graduate program, just one. I knew we’d be moving to Seattle next summer as my husband had received a job offer from his internship last year. I simply picked the biggest university there and applied. But I didn’t really put in the effort to get in; I was just going through the motions of what I thought I should do. As we transplanted ourselves to this new location, I left behind the person who blogged meditatively to understand life, who hiked through England writing essays, who lived and breathed words. I clipped those branches away and settled into another life.
When spring arrives, I can see out my dining room door the red branches that grew from the bareroot blueberry plants over the course of the fall. The old branches are brown and ordinary, but the new branches are bright red, the red of embers, the color I once heard called the true first color of spring. I search for the source of this quote, hoping it’s someone deeply writerly, perhaps Annie Dillard. But no, all I’m turning up is Ally Condie, author of one of those YA dystopian romances, which I have in fact read. Typical.
As the season goes on, the branches fill with tiny buds, then tiny green leaves, and finally tiny white bells. There aren’t many because there aren’t many places for them to grow yet. The bushes now resemble a bundle of leaf-covered twigs stuck into the ground, like some elementary school child was building an upside-down teepee but was interrupted by the recess bell.
We—my three children, I, and my 8th month belly—brave the constant misty rain of a Seattle spring for a most peculiar chore. My children look at me in shock when I instruct them to pull off all the flowers from their beloved blueberry bushes.
“But why, Mom?” says Noah, the most sensitive one. “Doesn’t the plant need them?”
Yes, the plant does need them. It’s the whole reason we bought the plant. It’s because the flowers will soon be pollinated, lose their petals, and begin to swell into blueberries. But the nursery instruction sheet informs me that removing the flowers in the first season will prevent the stunted bushes from putting all their energy into creating berries, which there wouldn’t be many of in the first year anyway. Instead of producing sugar to shove into delicious purple bundles to attract birds (and hungry preschoolers), the plant can put all its energy into stabilizing its brutalized root system and growing more branches. By focusing its attention on one thing at a time, the bush will be more successful over the long run.
Still, my children try to leave some of the flowers, unwilling to fully commit to such a travesty against this summer’s harvest. The small flowers conceal themselves behind the leaves like children who know they are about to be in trouble.
I finish the job.
My fourth child—the longed-for daughter after a string of boys—will be turning two this spring. Two of the bushes have grown significantly and will probably yield a harvest of a few cups. It’s nothing compared to the monster bush we left behind at our old home a few years ago. That 15-year-old bush gave us at least four cups of berries weekly for a whole month each summer, more berries than even a house with two foraging toddlers could deal with. But these two bushes are making a good start on their promise in this third year. They now properly look like they deserve the title of bush instead of sapling.
The third bush, unfortunately, sits next to our ground level deck, which shelters a cadre of brown rabbits, scourge of all Pacific Northwest gardens. Our neighborhood is so infested with them that a coyote has been spotted on neighbors’ security cameras, lured into urbanity by plentiful and lazy prey. These under-deck rabbits have been carefully whittling away at my bush’s branches—not to eat, but to cut their ever-growing teeth on.
I look out my window at these bushes as spring begins again this year, and I wonder if I will be like the third bush or the other two. Have these years of lying fallow allowed my writing talent to store up material, allowed my family to grow with the energy that was shunted away from writing?
Social media brings me stories of friends starting successful blogs, writing for newspapers, and publishing novels and books of poetry. Some of them also have young children. I wonder how they are able to do both at once. Am I defective because like a blueberry bush I can only either grow or produce fruit but not both at the same time?
Is a blueberry bush still a blueberry bush without its fruit? Is a writer still a writer if she does not write? People say that you’re a runner if you run and a writer if you write. Many writers say they feel compelled to write, that they really can’t help it. I perhaps am not one of those. Are there other types of writers? Those of us who store up words in our heads, season after season, waiting until the conditions are right to put them to paper.
I have found comfort recently in reading from Madeline L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journals. Though A Wrinkle in Time was the first real novel I ever read—one I returned to over and over in my childhood and adolescence—I actually knew very little about the woman who wrote the book. The first volume of her journals, A Circle of Quiet, spends its beginning dwelling on the fact that she didn’t start her writing career until her thirties, and Wrinkle wasn’t published until she was almost forty. The stories of her children sending her to the attic office to write whenever she was grumpy make me hope for moments like that in my future, when my children become old enough to accommodate the idea that their mother is not just an endless supply of goldfish crackers, Band-Aids, and bedtime stories, but a real person with a functional need to create.
L’Engle, and her family, lived in an old house (named Crosswicks) out in the middle of the woods, and sometimes she needed to get away. “Every so often I need OUT; something will throw me into total disproportion, and I have to get away from everybody—away from all these people I love most in the world—in order to regain a sense of proportion.” If a better description of being a mother to young children has ever been written, I’ve certainly never met it.
As I continue reading, I am struck over the head by a mention of blueberry bushes, seemingly out of nowhere, right as I have begun to attempt to carve out just one hour a week to write this essay. As L’Engle escapes from her family, she retreats to a secret spot near a brook, which just so happens to be filled with several tall blueberry bushes:
The burning bush: somehow I visualize it as much like one of these blueberry bushes. The bush burned, was alive with flame and was not consumed. Why? Isn’t it because, as a bush, it was perfect? It was exactly as a bush is meant to be. A bush certainly doesn’t have the opportunity for prideful and selfish choices, for self-destruction, that we human beings do. It is. It is a pure example of ontology. Ecology—ontology—the words fascinate me. Ontology is one of my son-in-law’s favorite words, and I’m apt to get drunk on words, to go on jags; ontology is my jag for this summer, and I’m grateful to Alan for it—as for so much else. Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.
I suppose the ontology of the writer is what I am worried about: if the is-ness of a writer is that she writes, then I am not a writer. But if the ontology of a writer, particularly a writer of essays, is to be one who thinks, one who makes odd connections, who looks at a blueberry bush and thinks of Moses on Mount Sinai or the balance between the writing life and the motherly life. If this type of thinking is what makes a person a writer, then perhaps my self has not been subsumed in this selflessness of motherhood.
“By their fruits, ye shall know them.” But what if I don’t have any fruit yet? But of course, that is silly. I have four adorable, troublemaking, maddening fruits, and the people they are becoming do me credit. But the scriptures do seem to often define our ontological selves as what we produce. I look up the scripture and find, “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” (Matt 7:16)
Maybe that’s my problem, I feel I’m bringing forth fruit that is good, yet a type that isn’t fully me, as if my blueberry bushes suddenly sprouted strawberries. It was never my intention to be a mother of children; I was open to that happening, but I always perceived it as so out of my control. If a woman learns anything from the Old Testament, she ought to learn that.
Perhaps a blueberry bush is a poor substitute for a human being. And searching for a better analogy in the nursery catalogs that arrive continuously in spring, I come across grafted fruit trees: trees that bear multiple kinds of fruit all on one tree. Peaches, nectarines, and plums; apples and pears; even raspberries and blackberries. I’ve long admired the idea, so compact and useful to get multiple fruits, but only spare ground and labor for only one tree. Perhaps God is likewise economical in his crowning creation, not creating more humans than are needful, but having each of us serve as many purposes as possible. It would be a poor person indeed who had only one thing to contribute to the world.
Yes, without its fruit, a blueberry bush is still undeniably, ontologically itself, still capable of producing fruit. A year without it had not changed its nature. I sit here counting the years, not many left, at least compared to the ones that have passed, until my children are all in school full time, and I am left blessedly in control of my own schedule again. I think of all the things I will do with that wealth of time I didn’t appreciate that I had when I was a college student.
But, oh, it is hard to remove all the flowers.
Maybe I’ll let this one stay.
Liz Busby is a mother of four children living in Bellevue, Washington. When she’s not being clamored and climbed over, she enjoys long distance running, yoga, and playing board games and video games with her husband. She loves reading science fiction, fantasy, history, science writing, and self help, as well as pretty much anything that holds still for long enough.