AW Journeys: The Taste of Blackberries

The Taste of Blackberries

By Christine Kindberg

The day I went back to Metrenco, Chile, it was sunny—bright enough to need sunglasses, warm enough to tie my jacket around my waist. When my flight left Chicago, it was the tail end of a winter that got so cold it was possible to get frostbite within five minutes of going outside. As the plane wing pointed out the first rays of morning emerging behind the Andes, I was arriving in summer. It was my first time back to Chile in over twenty years. People had warned me that returning to my childhood home might be a disappointment. Places change, they said. Buildings get torn down; fields get paved and become parking lots. The people you cared about move away. It will never be the same as you remembered.

But even if nothing was left, I wanted to stand in the place that had shaped my childhood. I wanted to be there again, in Metrenco, to see what had become of that house and the trees and the fields I left when I was nine. We moved eleven times in four countries before I turned eighteen. This house in Chile was the place I’d lived longest, the first place I remembered, before I realized I could never fully belong anywhere. It was the last place we’d lived where I didn’t think about how we would eventually have to leave. This was where I learned to ride a bike on gravel roads, where I spent hours climbing trees and playing Barbies, reading in a hammock, and playing pretend with my brother and our neighbors and my dog.

This was the home I revisited when asleep. The little wooden house surrounded by pine trees and bamboo thickets, hemmed in by barbed wire fences woven with blackberry brambles. In my dreams I could still run through the orchard, past the guest house, down the field toward the tall, conical tree we called the Rocketship Tree. Sometimes I climbed the tree again. Sometimes I found myself unable to move, just standing there, staring at it.

I convinced my brother to go with me. My brother, an Anglican priest and church leader, had a conference in Santiago at the beginning of April, so I talked him into flying down a few days early to visit our childhood home with me.

I arrived in Chile a week before he did. Through Facebook, I’d gotten in touch with one of my closest friends from elementary school, who was now living in the capital city with her husband. The plan was that Carla and I would meet in a metro station and go get coffee. As I arrived in the station, I realized my phone didn’t work underground, and I panicked—at which exit would she be waiting? How would I recognize her? Would she recognize me?

But then there she was: she couldn’t be anyone else but the adult version of the nine-year-old who had been my friend.

Carla and I talked for hours, laughing and serious by turns, remembering stories from when we were kids. How we’d dressed in matching homemade costumes for a school performance. The games we’d played at my birthday parties. How her younger sisters would follow us everywhere when I went to her house to play. The friends we played with in Sunday School. The adventures we had when I joined her family for vacation.

She told me about how she was left out of our former friend group after I moved, and how she eventually switched schools because of it. I told her how hard it was to adjust to life in the US, and how hard it was to move to Panama two years later. She told me about studying law and what it was like to be a public defender in Chile. I told her about studying English and writing and what it’s like to work as an editor.

She’d taken the afternoon off from work to meet me, and she made us dinner as we talked into the evening. Despite my initial worries about what it would be like to see her again, I was glad to find she was someone I would have wanted to be friends with if we met today.

Then I flew to Temuco, in south-central Chile. Through the plane windows, the trees and fields became more and more familiar. I spent the night with family friends, retelling more memories, amazed at how much they remembered from my childhood. Then I picked up my brother from his flight, and we drove twenty minutes to Metrenco.

The highway had been redone— it was more streamlined and smooth—and the exit was at a different place than it had been. Still, once we got off the highway, we knew where we were. We traced remembered landmarks until we found the old road we used to take every day to and from our school in the city.

Yes, there was the railroad crossing where my mom’s Jeep was hit by a train because there was no stop guard and she couldn’t see around the bushes. There was the convenience store we sometimes walked to, next to the house that had a dog that bit someone—was it me? Was it my brother? There was the school with the basketball court out front where we sometimes came to play. The basketball court hadn’t changed a bit.

The gravel road was the same too— nicer gravel, maybe—in the section where new neighborhoods had been built on either side of the road. I didn’t remember it being as far of a drive down that road. But surely that was the dairy farm that was next door to us, with the neighbor who brought us bottles of milk fresh from his cows, milk neither my brother nor I had wanted to drink.

And there was our gate. It now had a sign saying Koyamentu, announcing what was now a church retreat center. Gone was the gatehouse where the groundskeeper used to live, but the drive was still lined with eucalyptus trees.

This was the home I revisited when asleep.

I turned into the two-track road, feeling like I was driving into a memory. I drove slowly, shaking, tears just behind my eyelids, wide-eyed as I tried to take it all in. How could it be that I was there? How could it be real? Was I sure that this time I wasn’t dreaming?

I remembered this bend, where the eucalyptus ceded to bamboo thickets where we’d built forts and mapped out passageways. I remembered this other bend, approaching the beet field. This was the stretch of road where our dad used to let us sit on his lap and steer the car. There was the cow pasture we would walk across to visit our neighbors. There were the blackberry brambles, still clinging to the barbed wire fence.

We parked and walked to the wooden house that had been ours. A man came out to meet us, the caretaker who lived there now. He told us we could walk around all we wanted, but he didn’t invite us in. I told myself that was okay; it was mostly the outside I remembered, anyway. I didn’t ask if there was still brown shag carpet and if the room on the back left still had soft pink walls. I’m sure it didn’t.

As we walked around, my brother and I kept pointing and remembering. There was the thicket where we once found the stone carving our dad destroyed because he thought it was an idol. There was the ledge where we would hop onto the stilts our dad made for us. There was the tree where we had a tire swing. There was the field where we set up goal posts to play soccer.

We walked past the guest house, through the orchard, down the field toward where the Rocketship Tree had stood. The tree wasn’t there anymore. We couldn’t agree on where, exactly, it had been; there weren’t any indications left.

Do you remember—we asked—how high we’d climb? How the bottom branches were like a spiral staircase? How there was a certain branch we pretended was a motorcycle? Another branch we challenged each other to jump from?

My brother told me he used to dream of Chile, too.

We kept walking until we reached the woods. We explored again the thicket where we’d had trails and hideaways. The sunlight filtered through the bamboo shoots, casting long, thin shadows that crisscrossed our faces. It was past season for copihues, but there: high above us, on that vine clinging to the trunk of an old tree—a splash of cardinal red in a trumpet shape. The Chilean national flower—so rare it doesn’t grow anywhere else on earth.

And there, in the shadows of the woods, was a blackberry bramble that still had berries, as if they’d been waiting for us. I had no basket—I wasn’t collecting them for any pies my mother had in mind—and so I ate as many as I could find. They stained my fingers purple, and they tasted just the way I remembered, as sweet as familiar laughter.

The memory box that hangs on my wall in the Chicago suburbs now holds a black rock I picked up from the gravel in Metrenco, and I keep up with Carla on Instagram.

I haven’t dreamed about Chile since I visited. Now, when I think about the place, the new memories I have of going back are stronger than my memories of the loss I felt when leaving.

Now, I remember how my brother and I roamed the woods where we’d grown up, and how we sat and talked about our childhood, about the things we’d lost when we’d left, about how our family is and who we are because of it, how grateful we are to have grown up surrounded by woods and fields.

Now, I take comfort from the fact that I know there are still copihues growing high up in the trees, where they always did. And I’m glad there are still blackberries growing along the barbed wire fence and in the woods, where they still taste sweeter than a dream, better than blackberries from anywhere else in the world.

Christine Kindberg grew up in Peru, Chile, Panama, Kentucky, and North Carolina. She works as a Spanish-language editor at Tyndale House Publishers and is the author of the novel The Means That Make Us Strangers.

https://ChristineKindberg.com

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