There’s a blueberry bud on the second bush. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is a BIG deal. That bush hasn’t produced a blueberry in four years. When Steve’s oldest was six, the little scamp took a stick, and he beat the bejesus out of that bush. You wouldn’t believe the aggression that tiny kid took out on this poor unsuspecting bush. That bush, as far as Steve could tell, never did a thing to that child.
Still, it’s just a bush, right? Steve chided the kid because he knocked all of the many blueberries off of it. They could have happily eaten those blueberries. They took special care to make him promise he wouldn’t do it again.
His son has been in and out of self-contained classrooms, all the therapies, and like Steve, is prone to bouts of frustration. Everyone’s frustration goes somewhere. Steve’s builds up like steam in a kettle. Without the proper venting procedure, he’s set to blow his top, every time. His six-year-old chose to do so via the act of beating the absolute snot out of that blueberry bush.
What was wild though, was that the next year, the blueberry bush did not produce blueberries at all. Zero. Then the same thing happened the year after that. The other bushes around it produced but that specific bush, the beaten bush, did not. Steve was puzzled as the leaves still came in. The bush was green and healthy by all other accounts. The same could be said of his son, struggling through his days. Steve felt powerless as he watched the boy grow and diverge further from him, to take on more of the guff of the world.
He researched the issue. As it turns out, plants could carry trauma. Steve mused, while examining the plant, that this particular blueberry bush had his son’s anxiety and frustration transferred onto it. It grew. It greened. But it did not bear fruit. It carried the memory that it would not be safe to do so.
Steve felt guilty about the bush. Of all the things he could have felt guilty for, the drinking, the yelling, the off-handed comments when he was hungover, the mean things spoken in his own moments of frustration. But no, he’d chosen to feel guilty about and for that bush. Imagine that! Feeling guilty about a plant. His wife suggested they get rid of it, but Steve’s silly guilt persisted, and he moved the plant to a new place in the yard, a shady place, out of the way. He dug a new hole wide and deep and planted it with fresh, nutrient dense topsoil—this shrimpy, non-producing traumatized blueberry bush. He’d done this of his own volition. There was no magical spider that wrote in a web above the plant “some bush” or something of that nature.
The bush survived the transplant. That first season it did not produce blueberries though Steve took care to prune and water diligently. But this year. The fourth year after the beating from his son, little glorious nodules began showing and grew into delightful berries. Pale green, then a hint of red on the edge, a pinking giving way to deep purple blue. The little plant that could!
Steve jumped when he went to water the plant that morning and noticed the little nodules. He ran inside to his wife, “The blueberry bush is making blueberries!”
“Isn’t that what it’s supposed to do?” she asked him.
“No! You don’t understand,” He pointed across the yard past the bird feeders outside the breakfast nook window. “That one!”
She grinned at Steve. At the joy of this grown man and his rogue berry bush. He was proud of a plant. A proud plant papa! Perhaps he would teach it to ride a bike next, she thought. Whether the proof was there or not, Steve felt validated for the care he tendered to the bush. It was a plant that had something deeply stained in its proverbial bones. A plant that needed kindness and time and the knowledge that it could simply be with no expectation. Steve never truly expected it to grow into anything ever again. He only expected it to live, and as such, it did.
As Steve harvested those berries, he cried. He felt this compelled compassion aimed at this silly plant come to fruition. He imagined what could happen if he’d facilitated this process for something that was more than just a plant. When he shouted at his son, what got stained into his bones? Or when a child gets made fun of at school, how could he expect them to bear the precious fruit of their innocent minds? To grow and pay that compassion forward? When Steve yelled, was he transferring his pain onto his precious boy? Was his son now being given Steve’s grandparents’ pain passed into him through his mother?
If this is the case, then which berries and flowers don’t blossom as a result? If they still manage to, do the berries now inadvertently have a different taste? Are they as sweet? Steve sat on the ground and let the thought level him. What about all the people that see or say something to another because they disapprove or don’t understand or have something that doesn’t jive with their worldview—rather than just shutting up and moving on with their day because it doesn’t affect you in the least (a permanently viable option…an option that is always there for you)? All because they needed to satisfy their own itch and agenda. The agenda is subconscious, from a place of insecurity. The result is passing on pain to another.
There are ways to transmute the pain into something positive. Steve felt that by moving the plant and taking extra care, that his pain and guilt was being excised, transferred but also transformed. Plants do this naturally in part. Think of how mammals exist in the symbiosis of breathing. People breathe out carbon, the plants take the carbon and turn it to oxygen and people breathe in again.
Surely this can’t be the only medium of balance and transfer, Steve’s mind raced. Whether or not he could quantify it in a similar fashion as a scientific cycle. Could pain be transferred in a similar way? Are there many shades of energy as certain philosophies would see it? Do we stain the earth? He imagined the Earth herself will outlive our trauma, manufactured or otherwise. Does what comes after us feel our pain? How many years to wipe away the stain before she heals when we are gone?
No one can know, but the answer to “how long?” will be longer than we’ve got left. Will she self-nurture? Will she maybe “decide” (as if anyone decides such a thing) that she can’t release her pain because she doesn’t know how? Was Steve thinking about the Earth, a plant, a stranger, or his child? Was it all the same thing? If you walked barefoot in your backyard and touched the ground and said “sorry” in earnest, would it help? Will anything? Is it too big? Would he leave it to his kids to solve with all of the bile in their bones and in the ground below them passed from him? Would he tell them when they grow that he tried? Would he be lying?
It is too big. And for all his vitriol, he could be mad and sad and overjoyed and proud of the fact that the blueberry bush came back. But now he was wary of transferring his pain. It all goes somewhere.
Matt Durante is a full-time writer, member of the AWP, and James River Writers Association, and a creative writing Drexel MFA candidate (graduating in June). I write novels and short stories; primarily psychological thrillers, speculative, and horror.
