Cranberries. My favorite. I love the color and the tangy, tartness of a ripe cranberry. They make me think of home. The invisible migrant workers in the bog down the street. The brown overalls and large rubber boots the old men wore as they stood knee deep in the cold waters of the bog. Knotted muscles scooping, bending, harvesting berries as blood red rays of the sun pass over my house. I loved how these same men would tip their oily hats when my friends and I bought Schlitz beer from them on a Friday night.
Cranberries. The air was pungent with frosty maple leaves, sand pines, and the magical shimmer of the berries that floated in the boggy waters. I remember sneaking down to the bog when the old men left and tried to scoop my own with broken tools left in the dirt. I bit into one. Horrible, bitter fruit belying its jeweled outside. The inside looked like death to me. I spit it out and ignored the berry for a long long time.
When I became a seasoned person, I bought a bag of Ocean Spray cranberries from the supermarket. The bag doesn’t explain the labyrinth of the bog or the cedar forest that lies behind it. The way the sun turns everything magenta at sunset. The bag doesn’t explain the excitement of the fire trucks that come at the end of summer and flood the bogs. The arrival of the Puerto Rican families that move as silently as snowflakes into the shacks in the woods. I peeked inside a shack once. There was no furniture, just moldy pictures of Jesus and John Fitzgerald Kennedy on the wall. Driving down the winding dirt road to buy my beer was like driving into another world. There was respect in the village. There was poverty in the village. There was a silence in the village that concealed the suffering. But I was too young then to understand it. So, I would nod politely and pay for my beer as old men lifted the cases of Schlitz from the backs of rusty blue trucks.
The Ocean Spray bag doesn’t explain the anticipation of the first freeze and then skating on the bog, over the berries that wink in their icy grave. The ice crystals that formed on the cedar trees. The way the water froze so smoothly around the trees and the exhilaration of skating there at night with only starlight to guide me.
The Ocean Spray bag doesn’t explain that the bogs are not near the ocean and that they never get sprayed on by the Atlantic. They lie there in a cryptic beauty, waiting to be discovered.
Cranberries. I am going to eat some now. The tartness will bring up memories of starlight on cedars. The bitterness will never let me forget the stoic, silent men and women that worked with knotted muscles in icy blood red waters.
Cranberries for Thanksgiving.