Reading Our Region

Essays from a Regional Writer

Susan Charkes enjoys hearing and telling stories, especially those involving the environment, farming, and sustainability in our region. Discover her poetic view of the outdoors and be inspired to visit the places she describes. Learn more about Susan, her writing, and even hear her podcasts at www.susancharkes.com.

Sample these selected writings:

Featured Items:

Message sent; message received

by Susan Charkes

Inky-purple, smooth and shiny, compact, energy-packed, a mobile connection center.

Now take a bite.

Ow!

Your Blackberry is very unforgiving.

Try mine.

Held for a moment between top and bottom teeth, the waxy, nubbinous surface yields slightly before popping forth a burst of sweet-tart juice, a dash of pulp and a mess of tiny seeds.

That’s my blackberry.

Oh, you say your Blackberry connects you to billions of other humans and augments our exponentially expanding capacity for communication. Email, phone, pictures, websites, music: all day all night four seasons.

Slurp. Yeah, well – oh, excuse me. I’m getting a message.

>>We are not here for ourselves alone.

[There is no reason for my blackberry to exist other than to entice mobile sugar-lovers like me to take it, eat it and drop the seeds. Our moment’s pleasure is the plant’s treasure: a quick energy jolt it has created just for us, from sun and water and air and soil, a gift that it exchanges for our complicity in its drive to survive.]

>>A berry dried is the future denied.

[To leave a ripe blackberry uneaten is an affront to the nature of things. It is our duty to seek out this humble member of our community, and then, to enable it to achieve its destiny.]

>>Even when you can’t see me, I’m here for you.

[Summer arcs past its sultry zenith, free solar energy for the taking; but we can’t take it: not in that form. We need something else, and we know what it tastes like. Darkest night electrified by brightest day.]

Oh, you say your Blackberry is hardly one-dimensional. Its messages come in multiple media. Now if you’ll just take that away from your ear and put this up to it, what?—can’t you hear that? No, it’s not broken. It just buzzes naturally.

>>Gather ye nectar, sweet sweet nectar, afore the flower fades.

[Every season has its flower, till the seasons are no more. Five paddle-shaped, shallow-cupped white petals splay wide to the sky round a delicate green-yellow fuzzy center, pointing the way, drawing in the seeker. Blackberry flowers perfect each rare June day, but not they alone, nay, only when they are graced by the bee’s presence. Attention exalts the merely beautiful.]

What, this? oh, it’s nothing. A little scratch, is all. And what did yours cost?

>>Leave those leaves alone.

[A long languid summer, flowers bud into green berries, berries brighten to red, red ruddies to purple, purple deepens to black: all the while bonds are broken, molecules re-arranged, sunlight fueling sugar-making . Such a long, long time for leaves to last. All during leaf-eating caterpillar season. Soft, tender caterpillars do not mix well with sharp thorns, thorns arrayed on the canes and along each leaf’s petioles and midvein, a caterpillar-deterring cheval de frise. Larger, soft and tender skin-sheathed creatures are so just much collateral damage. Suffering only acquires a moral cast (the price for earthly pleasure) for those who denote themselves victims.]

Otra vez? Ah, sí, your Blackberry can translate messages from other languages, on-the-fly?

>>Flies? Flies? Poor puny things! Who wants to eat flies? …Not when I can get nice fat blackberries!

[Some of us eat flies. Some of us eat spiders. Some of us eat caterpillars. Some of us eat leaves. To each his own. But each of us, here in this thorny thicket, braving the heat and the ticks and the poison ivy and the scary smelly two-legged creatures, adores the fat juicy sweet berries. Each of us, in our own unfathomable way, becomes fathomable to the other in our shared joy. A berry is a rosetta stone.

>>We are all drupe dupes.

[Summer’s stone fruits are large like peaches, medium like apricots, small like cherries; fleshy fruits surround a hard seed center. Drupes, all of them. As are blackberries: myriad oh-so-tiny little drupelets each surround a teeny-tiny seed. Blackberries are not so much fruits as they are fruit gatherings; for what fruit-eating winged or walking forager would bother to stop for a single blackberry seed pearl? All those little drupelets band together into a big eye-catching solid-looking “fruit.” Now we see it! Now that is worth reaching in past the thorns for! Can we pluck it from the cane with no effort at all ? If the plant resists we are best-counseled to wait. The stem will separate when the plant decrees the fruit ready. So now we eat, now we run, now we drop the seeds. And we have done what it set out for us to do. ]

Your Blackberry’s messages are up-to-the minute; they’re current to the second, even the nanosecond. But my blackberry retrieves the future.

>>Oh, my, this is one fine summer evening, just like last year, when you ate the blackberry you are eating now.

[On and on. One blackberry embodies the conditions that gave it substance, and contains the conditions for what will follow. Within the present are the past and the future. One blackberry, one moment, one message.]

>>You are not alone.