Blackberries grew in humongous groves on the nearby islands known as the Blackberry Isles. 

The biggest island was a tangled forest bog of oaks and sycamores.  It was a wild place.   

“You stay here this time, Manx,” said Mona to her big brown dog.  Manx wagged his tail.  Mona had found him on the Blackberry Isles one spring morning, as he lay on his side, weak from swimming several miles from shore, and looking much like a large ant mound.  She mightn’t have noticed him if his labored breath hadn’t so shaken the mound that was his body, and if he hadn’t lifted his tail and wagged it faintly when he saw her.

  

Nanny said Mona could keep him, since he bothered to swim so far.  They often speculated on why he had swum so many miles to get nowhere in particular.  Nanny believed he’d ventured out in the water as he chased some seabird, and then swam too far to turn back.  Mona, however, felt he disliked the mainland and had decided one day to leave it.  Whatever the reason, he seemed very happy on Pearly Beetle.  His fur was always wet from splashing in the sea and his paws were stained from salt. His full name was Manx Shearwater, but like Mona, he preferred his nickname.  Manx very much wanted to come and Mona would have let him, but last time he’d come berry picking, he knocked over all the full pails chasing after gulls.  As she said good-bye this morning, she waved to Manx, who wagged his tail.    

​

 Mona and Nanny went outside and down the winding path.  Tied to one tiny peg, scrunched between the island bank and the ocean, was a small dinghy named the Leviathan.  Mona and Nanny climbed into the Leviathan.  The water sloshed about the boat’s sides.  Mona rowed with one oar and Nanny rowed with the other, until the boat touched the tip of the Blackberry Isles.  With some help from Nanny, Mona pulled the boat onto the sandy shore.  They walked a little way to the great groves of blackberries.  The bushes were very tall, taller even than Nanny, with prickles sticking every which-way. 

 

“What are we going to make?”  Mona asked as she dropped some berries into her basket and wiped her fingers on her bathing suit.    

“Well,” said Nanny, “tomorrow afternoon, I’ll bake the most delicious pie in the world, while you do some arithmetic.”  Mona slouched a bit.  She did not like arithmetic, although she did like pie. She moved deeper into the tall blackberry brambles, so when Nanny looked around for Mona, no sign of her could be seen. 

​

They strolled through the spaces between the briars and picked like that for several lazy hours.  The hot sun shone on their backs.  Nanny wiped her forehead with her sleeve.  Mona breathed in the dusty smell of summer.  Her arms ached with the heat.  Prickles stuck painfully and often in her bare feet.  She bent to pull out another and thought of how nice the cold ocean might feel.   

​

“Be back in a minute,” she called to the brambles and ran to the shore. She dove into the water and splashed about, dogpaddled, and lazily floated in the wonderfully cool waves until her fingers were wrinkled and her mouth tasted like salt.  Then, unwillingly, but feeling the task at hand, she climbed back to shore.  Water droplets trickled down her body in single file, and onto the ground.  As she walked back to the brambles, mud squished between her toes. 

She picked berries for several more minutes, humming, and absentmindedly scratching the back of her leg with her foot so mud speckled her skin. Suddenly, some glint caught her eye.   She bent below the bush and grabbed at it, then let out a yell.  Nanny, who was several brambles away, looked up in alarm. 

​

“Lookit!” Mona held a very rusty, somewhat slimy old teapot over her head so Nanny could see it above the brush.   

“I wonder it didn’t sink,” said Nanny as she twisted between bushes over to where Mona stood.  “I think it might have gotten here on a dinghy.   

Look there,” said Mona, and she pointed to several boards, which might once have been part of a boat.  A few spoons and forks also lay in the dirt nearby. 

“Don’t touch it, Child,” said Nanny, as Mona pulled a rather mildewed stack of papers out of the spout.   

“What luck!” cried Mona. 

“What a mess,” said Nanny as she stood above Mona, who now sat cross-legged on the path.     

“Wow,” Mona said as she straightened out several sheets, “I hope it’s a letter.  Hmm…it’s…some sort of essay about a house.”  Disappointed, she stood, brushed herself off, and handed it to Nanny.  Nanny, however, took the papers and looked them over carefully. 

​

“Why, it’s the deed to a house,” said Nanny, “I never expected to find one of these.” 

“What’s that?” said Mona as she cocked her head to the side to get a better look at the papers in Nanny’s hands. 

“It’s proof of ownership for one of the houses on the mainland.” 

Mona shook her head, a little alarmed. “Please put it back.  We don’t want it.”  She turned back to berry picking.   

Nanny said that Mona would eventually have to go to school on the mainland, but Mona hoped that the time to go to school would never actually happen, but always remain a hazy, distant point in the future.  Mona turned positively green with landsickness at the mere mention of the word, “mainland."  At least, she thought she did.  Ever since she had heard about seasickness, it made sense to Mona that landsickness could also upset a person’s stomach.  She hated the mainland with her whole heart.  Though she had never been there, she knew in what she thought was her soul that it wasn’t the place for her.   

​

It would be hard to put a finger on why Mona so disliked the mainland.  Mona herself did not give the matter much thought.  Her distrust of the mainland had not come from Nanny.  In fact, Mona’s attitude mystified Nanny because the older woman cherished memories of her childhood on the coast when it was a wild, unspoiled land, covered in pine trees.  Not many people had lived on the coastline then.

  

“Why do you hate the mainland so?” Nanny asked.  It was not the first time she had posed the question. 

Mona looked at her.  “You said there used to be so many trees you could see them from Pearly Beetle.  You said they grew tall and looked like they touched the sky.  Why would people cut down beautiful trees like that?” 

​

Nanny sighed.  Each time she asked, Mona stoutly denounced the mainlanders’ way of life.  Nanny could not understand it.  She felt it all had to do with the ocean and nature and change on the mainland, but because she was not very sensitive or imaginative like Mona, the anger escaped her.  Besides, Nanny was busy with Pearly Beetle and her own private thoughts.  Mona’s dislike of the mainland did not greatly affect their life at Pearly Beetle.  She had always been taught at home anyway. 

​

Sometimes, at night, Nanny wondered when she should take Mona to the mainland.  She knew she should have taken her a long time ago and that Mona would not dislike the mainland so much if she went, but somehow time had slipped away from her and she had never taken the girl, though Mona was now ten years old.  Nanny knew she would have to take Mona soon, but she continued to put it off. 

​

Nanny frowned and stared at Mona.  Finally, she spoke again, “I won’t put it back. We’ll take it home for safekeeping.  Maybe the person who lost it’ll stop by.”   

“We’ve got to keep that in our house?” cried Mona, alarmed.  She looked down. 

"Sailors’ll think they’re ours, and that we own a dreadful little house on the mainland,” said Mona, who scowled most horribly.  Nanny looked through her spectacles and down her long nose at Mona.  She pursed her lips. 

​

“Humph,” she said. “You’d do well to remember our house is very much the same as the houses on the mainland.  It was constructed with materials from the mainland.  That we live on land, even if it is an island.  You don’t live in the ocean, Child.  Call it what you may, but a bird without its feathers is still a bird.” 

​

Mona swung her berries around to face Nanny so several fell out of the basket.  She scowled, blinked away a heat and sting in her eyes, and slapped a mosquito on her shoulder with such force that a bruise formed the next day.  

“But an island without water isn’t still an island, is it?” she muttered. 

​

Nanny had turned back to the briars and hummed to herself while she picked.  She was not bothered or driven by philosophical passions and was happy enough to feel the sticky sweetness on her fingers and brush a fly from her cheek.  If she had ever experienced the nature of childhood with its overwhelming miseries, like seeing the last oak leaf wrestled from its haven of branches, and its desperate tantalizing burnings smelling of peaches.  The heart sits like a vase, precarious on the edge of its shelf, so easily and often nudged without notice by adults, and sent hailing to the ground, then she had long since forgotten.  She was unaware she had struck the girl with an invisible blow.   

​

Mona wrestled with the concepts of land and sea and their mingling, and middle ground or middle water; such heavy, sinking thoughts for a child.  Finally, she tossed her tangled, brown mane and went back to the blackberries.  Her heart, though damaged, felt the kindness of such a pleasant summer day and, like other child hearts, was soon lifted and set right again. They returned in the late afternoon.  Mona and Nanny cooked dinner together.   

​

Despite the gentle pleasures of the afternoon, after they’d dined and played cards with Mr. Rowley, Mona stepped upstairs one foot at a time.  The antique chairs, and sofas, and the grand chandelier hanging above seemed grotesque to her; she who had loved them so that morning.  With each breath she inhaled, she felt the nature of her house had changed.  Nanny, still as oblivious to the nearby universe of feelings as she was to the stars in the universe outside the window, kissed Mona goodnight and turned out her light.  Mona listened to the familiar clop step down the hall.  In the dark, her thoughts blazed.     

​

Hours later, possibly, though the passage of time ticks by differently in the dark and minutes are no longer beaded together as seconds, but rather years; Mona climbed out of bed.  She could hear the beat of her own heart like the crash of a thousand plates.  The creaks of Pearly Beetle made her back tingle.  In every dark corner, she was afraid of the ghosts of her ancestors or of the ancient founder of Pearly Beetle, the crooked sailor.  Shadowy figures breezed by her and settled in chairs and at tables all around her so she was afraid to touch the furniture. But Mona was a brave girl and with a heavy sigh she heaved the kitchen stools toward the screen door.  The door whined when she opened it, and she paused to hear any stirrings from upstairs.  When none came, she pulled a stool to the door’s edge and tied a rope to its leg.  Then she threw the stool into the darkness below.  It dropped to oblivion and she heard a loud plop mix into the beating of the waves.  She continued her errand with several more stools.  The continuous plop and crash of waves outside made her deaf to any sounds inside.  Her innards went cold and she jumped two feet in the air when she heard a voice suddenly behind her. 

​

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”  Nanny grabbed the small seaman’s chest that Mona was about to let drop. 

“I –I was seaing things for us.  I thought our things might look and smell a little nicer.  They’ll smell like a warm ocean breeze and, you know, they’ll look like driftwood.” 

“Oh, dear,” said Nanny.  She looked down at Mona through her spectacles. Her hands were on her hips, and she pursed her lips.  Anyone else might have found Nanny a funny spectacle with her hair stuck up in the wrong spots, her spectacles dangling on the edge of her nose, and her dressing gown hanging over her knees, but Mona felt a dim terror in Nanny’s current Medusa-like shape.   Mona felt her cheeks go red.   

​

 As late as it was, Nanny and the elderly Mr. Rowley fished the kitchen furniture out of the ocean. Several items had been thrown before the rope had been attached to them.  Mona stayed in her room, feeling ashamed. 

She felt a guilty longing to see the grandfather clock in the parlor.  When Nanny came upstairs, she sat on Mona’s bed and smoothed Mona’s hair back from her forehead.    

​

“Mona, you could have ruined all of our furniture.  You should have known better.  Putting things in the ocean damages them and where do you think we’d have to get new furniture?  The mainland.  We are connected with the mainland whether you like it or not. I’m going to take you there sometime, sometime soon.  And I do think you’ll like it.”  Mona didn’t respond.  She may have changed her feelings about possessions of hers that were from the mainland, but that didn’t mean her feelings had changed about the mainland itself. 

 

After all, their house and furniture were from a long time ago when the mainland was a very different place.  She shivered at the thought of visiting.  Nanny, thinking she was cold, pulled the covers over her and went to close the window as a cool breeze lifted the curtains.    

​

“Oh no, please leave my window open,” said Mona as the sound of the waves breaking against the island hummed in her ears.  Nanny smiled and headed for the door. 

“Good night, Nanny,” Mona said as the light switched off.  She closed her eyes and thought dreamily what a wonderful home to live in and such a good Nanny to live with.