Bearing Fruit

A week ago, my daughter Jessica flew home from Boston. Due to a couple of wrong turns en route, she'd arrived at Logan only twenty minutes prior to takeoff, with two bags to check. The airport was vacant. No one on the escalator, no line to check bags. Jessica put on her face mask and approached the counter.

"I think I've missed my flight," she told the agent.

"They're still boarding," the agent said, checking her computer screen.  "You can probably make it."

Checking bags took less than a minute, and Jessa raced off to security, where she was the only traveler. Quickly through the scanners, she grabbed her bags and boots and ran barefoot through the empty airport, past closed shops and kiosks, wearing her protective mask. She posted an image to social media just before take off: row after row of empty seats.

As the plane reached cruising altitude, she pulled out a notebook and pen to write a poem. 

Since March, my daughter has written thirty poems about the pandemic, publishing one in an online art exhibit and producing a video for her directing class with another. This past weekend she gathered craft paper, glue sticks, and floss to hand-stitch bindings for her own limited-edition chapbooks. 

With one semester of college left to go, Jessica isn't sure when she will return to campus to finish her degree or, if she takes a gap year, what will happen with her scholarships and financial aid. She has grieved her losses (tempered by and born of privilege) and both embraced the uncertainty and converted it into artistic records of this historic moment.

Today, another publication for Jessica. The final project for her public history class was to be a hands-on project in a historic home in Salem, Massachusetts. Jessa's professor shifted online like everyone else, offering alternate projects. Jessica opted to write an entry for an archival project called Historians Cooking the Past in the Time of Covid 19.

Blackberries by Jessica Harris

Jessica was nine when we moved to Oregon. Our new home backed to a creek, where wild blackberries had taken over the opposite bank. That August, Jessa learned to wade in the creek so she could reach the berries on the other side. Those vines somehow jumped the creek several years ago and soon swarmed up the Doug firs, crept through the pines, across what we used to call a lawn, and all the way up to the back porch. When I gaze down at them from the back deck now, I think of Sleeping Beauty's fortress of thorns. I think of my little girls, now grown, and how different the yard and creek look now.

In her "Blackberries" essay, Jessica weaves her own memories with Northwest history and landscape, seen through the lens of this present historic moment.