Landscape with False Memory

About the music

I have a vivid memory of picking blackberries with my grandmother in the woods behind her house in rural Pennsylvania. It was late summer. I was 7 years old. We used recycled Folgers cans for collecting the berries and by midmorning we were deep in the bushes, my fingers, elbows and mouth black and sticky and the Folgers can was full and heavy in my arms. My grandmother, I called her Maw, was singing Pretty Polly, one of the Appalachian ballads she always sang.

Maw was a few choruses in when an enormous black bear raised its head out of the bushes. The bear was about an armlength from Maw. Its snout was wet and dripping and I could hear it breathing. Maw froze and told me to back away slowly and to stay absolutely quiet. Maw always carried a pistol when we were in the woods, but she didn’t reach for it. Instead, she just stood there, staring at the bear, her right arm extended in that protective pose that grandmothers somehow know how to do. And then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the bear yawned, stretched and casually lumbered off. We headed back to the house and we made jam that afternoon. I’ll compare every spoonful of jam I ever eat to that blackberry jam, which is unfair, because there is no feeling that can compare to your Maw keeping you safe from a bear.

Here’s the thing: the story I just described definitely happened, but I’m not actually sure it happened to me. Maw had several grandchildren and most of us tell a version of the story, but we each place ourselves in the exact center of the events. Of course, I’d love nothing more than to ask Maw which one of us was the actual grandchild in the story. But even if she could answer, I doubt she’d indulge me. I like to think that Maw would be delighted by our shared “false” memory, because what remains constant in that memory is what matters: there are sleeping bears in blackberry bushes, but if you’re in the woods with Maw, you’re safe.