The Berry Patch

The local berry farm closed a few years ago.  That was a sad day for me.  The farmer’s kids didn’t have the desire to keep up the family land that had for so long produced juicy strawberries in late June and then perfectly honeycombed raspberries (purple and red) right on their tail.  In late July, there’d be blueberries so fat and sweet you could pop them right in you mouth. Sugar would have been redundant.

The closing of the patch was a loss to many of us locals and summer people and anyone who enjoys the ritual of growing or gathering their food understands why. Not only was there something satisfying about serving my family fresh, local grown berries, but there was a sense of accomplishment in picking them myself.

Heading to the berry patch was really more about communing and about companionship.  Bent over or on my knees between the rows of green bushes, dragon flies humming, and crickets chirping, the field was my church at times, the ritual a kind of morning vespers. Berry picking was something I did with my friend Liza (aka “Groove” a nickname from the 70’s, the exact origin of which has been lost).  Liza and I grew up on our little lake bay in the summers. She is the oldest continual friend I have and two of our children were born in the same years.  They have inherited their friendships by birth, an unspoken powerful connection.  Those ties go deep.

In the many years that Liza and I berry-picked, we survived the eye-rolling and the ridicule over our dogged devotion while the short season lasted.  Together and alone we braved hot temperatures, rain and mist, bugs and flies all to find our peace, chatting and picking, talking and advising, finding the rhythm of the row as we filled the little green cardboard boxes and loaded them onto the farm’s hand nailed wooden trays.

It was the conversation that counted, more than anything.  As our hands felt down the stalk, determining the firmness of a berry, our eyes focused on the color and our minds were free to talk.  Picking was also about tending a friendship, sustaining the strong parts and feeling tenderly for the weaker places.  Nothing was off-limits, in that easy way that lifelong friends have with one another.  We covered kids and parenting, picked over our marriages and memories and reinforced summer rituals we’d now instilled in our own children; Monday night square dancing, Friday night s’mores at the campfire. We gossiped and swapped stories.  We ate handfuls of berries straight from the vine.  Being in the patch accomplished many things.

When they were younger, Liza and I would drop our kids at the morning camp and race to the patch to pick and talk.  As they got older and able to join in, we’d occasionally bring them in the afternoons.  Even the most zealous berry picker soon became bored by our itinerant worker staying power.   They soon lost interest.

At home, berries were eaten plain or became ingredients for my annual ritual of jam-making.  I loved jam days; the washing, boiling and canning, ladling the sluggish ruby mixture into the cut glass Ball jars and later affixing the personal labels my artist friend Laura made for me.  The jams were my gift to dear friends at the holiday, a little bit of summer vacuum sealed in a jar.

It hasn’t quite been the same without the patch.  Yes, there are berries aplenty in the farmers markets around.  But it’s not the same.  It’s not like passing the field weekly and noting the height of the bushes, watching the farmer on his tractor and feeling the anticipation of opening day with the fervor of a baseball fan.  I miss the satisfying heft of lifting my pallet on the scale to be weighed, of stashing the boxes of fruit in the back of my car and closing the tailgate.

There’s talk of a new patch opening next year.  The plants are supposedly in the ground now, although I can't see them from the road.  Liza and I have more luxury of time as our children have aged.  In the absence of berry picking, we’ve found other places and ways to commune, on hikes with the dogs, in chairs at the beach with sunhats covering our heads.  Will we still find the same magic in the patch, that moment of release from our homebound selves?  Will our pattern be broken, our devotion lessened by the long break in our ritual?  I’ll let you know next summer.  

KEEP YOUR OAR IN THE WATER

My own mother’s words loomed large before I got pregnant, “do the things you want to do before you get married and have babies.”  And it was great advice.  By the time I gave birth to our first child, I had climbed the ladder in the marketing world, traveled and lived overseas.  My dream was to write a book and although I had cranked out a few measly chapters when we returned from a year in China, I didn’t have the JK Rowling in me to do it in between a full time job and my newly married life.

 

A mere two years later, our son was born into a time of personal transition.  My husband was leaving the security of the legal world and the moneyed track to be a broadcast journalist.  If I’d had any desire to stay home with this new baby, it was snuffed out by our new economic reality.  We qualified for food stamps in the state of California.

 

Moving around the country to bigger TV markets, having another baby, keeping my freelance writing and marketing business stoked was an enormous juggling act.   There were many times I envied the Moms who played tennis and lunched, the ones who didn’t feel the weight of financial contribution.  But mostly I loved my life.  I was energized and appreciated by forces outside the home.  I liked what I did and I moved among a slipstream of disparate and engaging female friends.  Before motherhood, I hadn’t thought a lot about whether or not I’d be a stay-at-home mother or try to work, there were no pre-conceived notions.  My role just kept evolving amidst the backdrop of our family and a larger picture.  I had no real master plan.

Today I sense a polite backlash among the present generation of young women who have watched their Moms buckle under the duel pressures of jobs and motherhood. They have shrewdly observed that the “sharing” of household duties by working parents still skews more like 70-30 in the most equal of unions. There is an often-unarticulated criticism, a whisper about the generation of mothers who came before who put careers first and motherhood on hold, stressed by the reality that you can’t have it all. At least not all at once.

It’s hard for younger women today to understand and appreciate the jackhammering that was done by previous female pioneers to even get to this point, the luxury and ability of women to choose.  The striving for equal pay and management positions seems so very quaint now, so “Mad Men” and yet it was not so long ago.  I still remember marching in a boss’s office my heart thumping, to tell him I’d discovered my male colleague, with the very same job and tenure, made $10,000 more than me.  I got a raise.  

Many young women think of “feminism” as a radical, cleaving and dirty word.  All that militarist bra-burning.  Yet it was that stridency, the elbowing and the path paving that allowed women today to expect to sit on boards and run for office, to go into space or attain a high rank in the military.  If you want to make a revolution you have to break a few eggs, said Chairman Mao.  Sometimes you get an omelet. 

My young daughters instantly fathomed the solution to the head-scratching riddle during my childhood about the injured child admitted to the ER.  The doctor, who was not his father, recused himself from operating because it was his son.  Q:  What is the relationship between the doctor and the boy?  A: She is his mother.

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE

Few people got that answer correct in the 1970’s.  And yet today it’s a quaint and dated joke.  For all of the glass ceiling busters and groundbreakers, the throwbacks and the backlash, motherhood and career have moved slightly off the combative “either-or” arena and have mellowed into a “what’s right for me?” choice.

Young women today tell me they will not delay childbearing.  They have seen too many women wake up at 40 wearing the “I forgot to have kids” sandwich board. And I hold my tongue.  There is no cookie-cutter approach to any of this, no one-size fits all.  And when those young women have children who leave the home and they yearn for a reinvention, trying to explain the two-decade gap in their resume to a prospective employer can be disheartening.  The mothers of my older children’s friends confide that the empty nest has brought a search for meaning, an internal ransacking of who they are now and a need to re-purpose that is soul-searching and often stressful.

On a recent episode of CBS’s “The Good Wife,” a young law associate shame-facedly reveals she is addressing wedding invitations at work and discloses that she is engaged, newly pregnant and quitting the firm to become a wife and mother. 

“But you can do both, you don’t have to give up the law,” says the older, wiser, now single Alicia Florick, who has returned to the workforce after her husband’s Spitzer-like public infidelities are revealed.  “But I love my fiancé,” is the young ingénue’s doe-eyed answer. 

A priceless expression crosses the face of the older, experienced woman who has learned the importance of being able to care for not only herself, but also her children.  It is one I recognize on my own face as I think about my once bright naiveté, the beauty of that expectation that we can nudge life in the direction we wish by just applying a little will power and positive thinking.   And how we hope it will.  And yet the young lawyer has not allowed for the possibility that the child she is carrying might not grow to term or be healthy, that her fiancé might not always love her or be able to provide for her.  It is the great divide between 20 something and 40 plus, the canyon between innocence and experience.

I recently lunched with a friend who’d been blind-sided by the economy, her husband’s job loss, depression and subsequent raiding of their savings.  She had left her job 22 years ago to raise the kids and was wondering now, in the midst of divorce, how she would pay the next tuition check.    She is an indomitable, resourceful woman and she will undoubtedly reconstitute herself in a new world order.   Our talk turned to raising our girls, the messages we would give them based on our life experiences and the choices they would inevitably make about partners and marriage, careers and kids.  How would each of our experiences as working and stay-at-home Moms shape their own visions for their lives?

“Keep your oar in the water somehow,” she said wistfully.  “That’s the advice I’m giving my daughter.”  And, thinking about my own life, I nodded my head in agreement.

Healing Amongst Black & White Photographs

Guest Blog by Cathrine White
Photos By: Cathrine White © All rights reserved 

Life offers us so much through blessing us with gifts both seen and unseen.  After dropping my kids off at school, I sit in silence on a chilly winter morning.  I cherish the time spent in my sunroom where I am surrounded by photographs and memories from where I have come.  For this, I hold extreme appreciation and gratitude.

When I was asked to share my journey with the Woodruff family, I wondered how I would possibly describe what it has meant, taught and given me. It is all so very personal, as I hold so dear the unique bonds that I feel fortunate to have around me.  However, I can say this, sometimes in life we are given opportunities to open our hearts and show our kindness with what we know best.

Photography was born within me from a very young age.  I don't have a memory when it was not a part of me.  I never had professional schooling, it just became a voice of expression and energy.  Today it continues to bear witness to my joy, happiness, growth and hardship. For within every picture I have taken, there resides a story, a human soul that I aim to capture in all its truth and grace.

'Documenting' the story of Lee and Bob was given as a gift of friendship and celebration after Bob's devastating trauma that almost tore their family apart. Almost.  But the story I captured did not end in sadness and despair.  Instead it was about the resilience of not only the human body, but the human spirit.  It told the echoing tale of family ties, the power of love and the simplicity of prayer as the only plan that comes to mind.  Their family, their marriage, is bound deeply by faith, strength and determination. Their spirit is so easily seen in those initial photos I took, and that same spirit was a catalyst for the friendship that has blossomed into what it is today.

In hard times, all we want is to find usefulness and to help in any way that we can. For me, offering my photography was the only way I knew how to be useful.   That day, there was an awareness and gratitude that I imagine can only be felt after you have come so close to loss, experienced darkness and felt such uncertainty.  When asked how I capture the moments the way I do, my answer is this - it's a combination of energy and joy within me, a tremendous connection to what is right in front of me. When I pick up my camera, I absorb that connection in a way that is beyond seeing it - it is feeling it, becoming one with it.  It is as healing for my own soul as it can be for the subjects I shoot, a moment of pure synchronicity.   The word 'namaste' seems so fitting  - I honor the space within you that is most like that space within me.

That morning with those first moments of captured energy, became the beginning of many amazing moments of black and white photographs.  The years have gone by and we have grown a beautiful friendship. To me, and so many others, the photographs truly reflect their time of healing.

It continues to be a very special experience to grow with Lee and Bob. Their family's transformation has been a force of its own. They are a true testament to strength and humility. I hope my photographs will always be a memory for what once was and how far they have come and continue to move forward in their personal lives, as well as their efforts to raise awareness with Remind.org.

With Gratitude,
-Cathrine White

Cathrine lives in New York with her husband and three children and their pug Biggie. She travels between L.A and New York for her passion.  To connect and view more of Cathrine's work please go to her website and blog:

http://cathrinewhitephotography.com/www/blog/New York  Los Angeles
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