August is blueberry season. If it was practical and at all healthy, I would very willingly subsist on two food items:

1) champagne

2) blueberries

I have a passion for blueberries. Big, fat, farm-grown, green-to-deepest-indigo blueberries by the handful, the bowlful, with cream or without, made into divine preserves, stirred into your oatmeal until they burst from the heat and the blueness bleeds through the beige.

Let me tell you about my mother's blueberry pies. To start, there is the pastry shell, molded flat into the pie-plate. Into this is poured a simply perfect combination of fresh, rinsed blueberries, white sugar, and a generous pat of butter. With blueberry pies, Mom goes the whole lattice-top route, weaving and interlacing strips of crust above the blueberry filling, creating a fence through which the imprisoned berries peek, ignorant to the 350 degree fate awaiting them. The lattice and the shell are quickly yet carefully pressed together, the pastry fluted into delicate waves by nimble fingertips. (That was always my job.) Then, into the oven.

Mom has never burned a pie. They always emerge bubbling and perfect, blueberry pies looking especially artistic because of the contrast between the deep violet of the berries and the golden edges of the crust. Cut and serve, and the juices ooze obscenely from the edges of your piece onto the plate, and the empty wound in the rest of the pie is quickly filled by molten filling. Sometimes you'll find a gob of semi-melted sugar saturated with just enough blueberry juice, like a piece of candy, a baking flaw that further perfects the homey dessert.

I remember picking the berries, helping with the baking, and eating the pieces with ice cream on the back porch after dinner and before The Cosby Show, carefully avoiding touching the upholstery with my purple fingers.

August.

Last night, Sunday night, talk-to-the-folks-night, my parents were noticeably down. As my dad said, "Kara's feeling really bad ... and the feeling's contagious." My sister's boyfriend, whom we had practically accepted into our family, has broken her heart, and she is ... awful. Apparently, there has been some new development in the whole breakup debacle, which Kara (my sister) has yet to divulge, which has further devastated her and is further worrying my parents.

My mother does nothing but worry. It's her "thing." I suppose it doesn't help much that the last few times I've spoken to them, I've been feeling particularly bad about myself. These are not feelings I usually share with them, but in addition to dumb self-esteem issues I think my acclimating to Chicago has somehow made me homesick for Massachusetts and my family. So lately, when I talk to I call home, I actually talk to my family.

It's sort of a post-partum depression kind of thing, perhaps a fear and a sadness about moving away. As I carve out a new home for myself here, the reality finally hits me that I have relocated in more than just the physical sense, and I am in mourning. In addition, I can't spend time with my sister in her period of mourning of a lost love, and I feel helpless and so far away.

My parents, my Mom especially, are floundering. They can't be of help. They know this. My sister cries, she goes home for the weekend, she cries, she is angry, she is sad, she cries she cries she cries.

I talk to my mom, she sounds like a ghost, hollowed from worry, and she cries. Then, of course, I cry. When I was little, my mom yelled a helluvalot, but I never saw her cry until my sister and I were grown. The tears are much scarier.

So, I'm lying on my bed, listening to my mother weep, and the only sounds I can make as indication that I'm still on the other line are soft sniffs and whimpers.

Yeah, I'm sure that helped.

I miss the days of topical boo-boos and the harmless sweet tooth. I listen as my mom apologizes for crying, I wish her well and assure her she's good, that Kara and I will be fine. I lie there, and I wonder how I got to be so difficult. When did our problems become intangible and complex? How did I "blossom" into this woman with gifts and demons, whose demons too often outweigh the gifts? How did my normal self-doubt fester into this infectious vein of self-destruction that burns more constantly than I care to admit? When did I become this thing that struggles every day to love herself, to accept that being nice is not such a terrible thing, that fights and fights and fights to keep herself from sticking her finger down her throat and her head down the toilet? Where was I when I let something so monstrous and unnatural become mundane?

I want everyone to know, I want no one to know. I fall and I get back up, and someday I will be alright. Baby steps.

I want a band-aid. I want The Cosby Show and a piece of Blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream.

No. These are the everyday heartbreaks, mine, my parents', my poor sister's. We will all be more than OK relatively soon, and there will be far worse days to come, I'm sure.

It doesn't have to be a tragedy that I can never go home again.

As you can see, the euphoria from my previous entry has worn off. I stood at the top and slid all the way down, my unprotected butt landing *scrape* on the playground gravel.

C'est la vie.

~ Last Five Entries ~

Moths, and Relative Nonsense - 08.18.05

I Finally Have Internet Access in my Bedroom. But, No Ashtray. - 08.09.05

Here I Am - 08.02.05

One-Armed Paper Hanger Earns her Wings - 07.29.05

Sugar & Lemon - 07.28.05

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BUY JEN'S BOOK! BUY IT! DO IT!

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BUY DEAN'S BOOK, TOO! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA! SERIOUSLY.

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