They stay to the old ways, weaving their mysterious will onto the backs of strangers. We go to the Cape at Harwich. Lovers for four years, we finally pick our first meal of sweetness, hidden in the leaf-hair of fields. Where you fell over in white jeans there are red splotches and we laugh. By twilight, burnt by sun, parched, we haul our cargo to the cool kitchen where my mother hulls and washes.
Fingers wave against their bodies.
She washes twice again, warns us that hulled berries tend to bleed. I think about berries after dark, stumbling about in the pine grove on the edge of an ancient pond. My foot touches clay, unprepared, I stub the intricate shell of turtle as she lays eggs, dreams of old tides.