It’s hard to explain how magical blueberries seem when you do not have them. My mother talked about berries like they were spells, growing on bushes in her yard. Raspberries and blackberries and blueberries, all berries that I had never seen. That I couldn’t even picture.
The berries that I most love are pitangas, berries my mother didn’t know as a child. There is nothing I don’t love about pitangueiras. You can tell them by their leaves, the old green, the young red, all small, thick, and glossy, as though they’ve absorbed water from the air and are shining it back to the sky. If you have any doubt, take a leaf and crack it between two fingers, hold it to your nose and breathe. The scent of pitangueira leaves is like no other plant, it clears though your sinuses, fills up your head. It is citrus without the sting, warm sunlight breaking through white, a gulp of summer ocean air, a child free for the afternoon running through the park.
I worry my children will not recognize the sight of a pitangueira. They will not hoist their small bodies up a pitanga tree’s trunk, the bark will not crisp in patches against their palms, will not flake at their touch and fall away. They will not feel the smooth skin under the bark, its solidity, tender but strong. They will not know how to bend the branches to search for the fruit.
I didn’t eat blueberries until adulthood. In my twenties, I spent a summer on a farm and worked a blueberry patch. I hacked and I raked till the patch was all clear and when the blueberries grew it was my job to pick them. The fruit grew on bushes that to me looked like trees, they were purple-blue, plump, and sweet. They tasted like candy, but they were not pitangas.
I worry that my children will not understand the fruit of my childhood. They will not know to press their faces to the leaves of a pitangueira’s branch nor to hunt for the berries that hang on slender pale stems, baubles the colors of summer: green, orange, cherry red, crimson. They will not know the delicate feel of the fruit in their palms, its rounded ridges, how easy it sits in a hand, a break from the stem at one end and tiny green leaves reaching up from the other. Its skin is so tight, perfect, thin, so easy to bruise.
If you rush and try to eat pitangas when they’re still green and small they will be hard and bitter. If you eat them once they’ve swelled and captured a yellow or orange tint, they taste sharp and delicious. The best is to find them once they’ve turned a deep red. On some trees pitanga grow into a burgundy so dark they are almost black, and these are the juiciest, tastiest ones, tangy, sweet, and sour. Like magic, a spell.
I wonder how much my mother felt that she lost, raising me as she did with a home country different from her own. If she has moments of looking at me and finding me a stranger to her. If when I pick pitangas straight from a tree and eat them without washing, when I crush the leaves and inhale home she thinks of blueberries and longs for hers. I wonder if she feels I am different from her, a child of a world that she entered but which was not born in her.
I worry my children will not know my home or will know it only from a distance, through my eyes and my stories but not through their own. I wonder if my mother understands how lonely it is to feel the whole world around you different from who you are. How much more lonely will I be when I see the children of my flesh at home in a world I view only with outsider’s eyes, when they ask for blueberries while I long for pitangas?
