Yes, there were blueberries. Not the kind my mother brought home from the store that could not be eaten until unwrapped and properly washed and sorted, but the ones that the older kids kept secret from the younger ones as a rite of passage into the woods where only they knew the location while we had to navigate through our fears of being lost and abandoned forever despite the woods only being a few hundred feet from familiar ground. Our pride and exaltation reflected in purple tongues, stained fingers and a bag of surplus berries we now had the power to share, or not. We filled our delight and waited for the next summer rain so we might repeat the adventure, but now, it was our turn to coax the younger in while knowing for certain no witches lived among the brambles.
And the rains did come, watering our world with a deep and rich petrichor luring us back into the woods. This time our senses on high alert for the flashing sparks of saffron through the morning light accompanied by the excited shrieks of “sally – sally” – the tiny woodland salamanders destined to live out their lives in a glass jar with grass and stones by the side of the bed, or destined for science experiments in suspended animation based on the sci-fi movies of the day. And then there was the moment when you allowed yourself to gaze into each other’s eyes and all of a sudden, the veil of separateness between you and the tiny golden newt would dissolve and it no longer became possible to keep the lid sealed atop the jar, and the new found pleasure of releasing the tiny soul into the woods superseded the desire to keep him.
