The Purple Berries Are Back

by Marilyn Moore

When I retired the second time, in 2016, I wondered what the rhythm of my days would be like.  For more than 40 years, I had lived by a calendar and a schedule that was mostly, well, hectic…some days bordering on frantic.  There was always the next meeting, the next phone call, the next project, the next crisis.  And I loved it all, well, almost all.  I was busy, engaged, and energized, and most of the time I felt productive, glad to work with the people who were my colleagues, and rewarded with the satisfaction of bringing collective efforts together to make a difference in the lives of students and their learning.  What would happen to the days, I wondered, when that calendar and that schedule were just cleared?

For most of those forty plus years, I started every Monday morning with a leadership meeting of some kind.  I would leave the house in time to get to the office, gather materials, make a cup of tea, and head off for the morning meeting.  In retirement, I vowed I would start Monday differently.  Instead of leaving home, I would savor time to read the paper, have a second cup of tea, and most importantly, look for beauty right where I live…our own yard.  Without fail, I have done that every week for more than five years.  (And yes, it’s much easier in summer than in February.)  If I happen to be out of town on a Monday morning, I still look for that spot of beauty, wherever happens to be “home” at the time.

It’s been a wonderful practice, and one of the things I learned quickly was that I really had no idea what was growing in our yard.  I know, we approved the landscaping plan, I looked at the name of every plant, I chose and planted the annuals each year, but I still really didn’t know what was growing, and I certainly had not looked at them carefully, over the span of a year.  I have been surprised every season of every year at a bud, a leaf, a flower, a seed, a pattern in the bark, that I don’t recall seeing before.  A friend commented that I finally had time to look at my own back yard, and that’s really true.  Embarrassing, but true….

One of the early surprises was the appearance of the purple berries on a shrub that during the summer is mostly green leaves with little tiny pink flowers.  I remember the first time I saw them, in the fall of 2016, about five years ago.  There they were, having appeared sometime in the week between Monday morning careful looks…. gorgeous purple berries.  They are beautiful, and they are sturdy.  They hang on until late winter, changing color from purple to deep red wine to brown, shrinking and shriveling and wrinkling, but hanging on.  They are stunning when they are coated with the first ice or snow of the season.  And then, in the late winter or early spring, they let go.  That’s the time to cut back the shrub, and it begins all over again.  

I’ve witnessed this now for five years, and I’m still as in awe as I was the first time.  Sometime, in the past week, the berries have begun to change from little green buds to full grown and brilliant purple berries.  And I practically cheer…well, I do cheer.  We all need something to cheer about, and for me, these berries are it.

My most recent blog was about the mayhem in which we are living our lives.  The delta variant, tenuous international relationships, persistent racial inequities, disputes over almost everything, from new legislative boundaries to the debt ceiling to vaccine mandates to immigration, shortage of workers almost everywhere and the resulting pressure to be more “productive,” whatever that might mean, and a level of anger and edginess that seems to be rising daily. All of those aspects of mayhem are still there…there’s been no noticeable lessening in the time since I wrote five weeks ago.  Each could be its own blog topic, and perhaps will be…. but not right now.  

For right now, I’m rejoicing in the purple berries, which once again remind me of the constancy of the seasons.  In the midst of much uncertainty, and what at times feels like what Madeleine L’Engle called a swiftly tilting planet, the purple berries are back, and they soothe my soul.