Free That Wild Berries Should Grow by Gloria Whelan

they skitter away you can tell they don’t like to be looked for. He picked up stones and threw them into the creek. He built a dam in the creek with mud and sticks so the water piled up into a little pool.
    â€œYou’re wrecking this place,” I said. “You can just leave.”
    â€œYou don’t own it.”
    â€œMy grandparents own it.”
    â€œThen they’ll have to tell me to get out.”
    Furious, I started up the bank just in time to hear Grandmama call us for supper. Tommy must have heard, too, because he was right behind me.
    I was so angry I could hardly sit at the same table with him. But when I watched how hungry he was and how quickly he ate his dinner, I stopped feeling so angry.

For the First Time
    Yesterday
    a snake ,
    green
    as
    grass ,
    coiled
    beside
    the
    blue-
    berries .
    Today
    a foolish
    hummingbird
    hovering above
    my flowered hat .
    For the first time I remember
    from one happiness to another .
    The library in Greenbush is so small that in ten weeks I’ve just about read all the children’s books. I can tell which adult books it’s all right for me to check out by the way Miss Walthers smiles or frowns when I take them to the desk. When she frowns she usually says, “Why don’t you find something else, dear.” The only time she looked startled was when I took out the Sanalac County Road Commissioners’ Report. It turned out to be pretty surprising because it talked a lot about snow, and it was hard to believe that Greenbush ever had anything but summer.
    A lot of the books I take out are about birds and butterflies and bugs. I like to match up the pictures with the things I see every day. I see a lot. I can’t believe I ever thought the country was empty. If you look hard enough there is something everywhere, and it is all surprises. Down in the gully I can watch the water striders skate over the top of the creek. Each strider makes five round shadows, one from its body and four from its legs. There are darners, their green and blue bodies so bright you think they must have lights in them. Once, before he saw me, I saw a muskrat bite off a bundle of grass and swim away with it.
    On hot days I put on my bathing suit and sit in the lake with the water right up to my neck. I watch the freighters along the lake’s edge. They don’t seem to be going anywhere, but when you look away and look back again, they have moved. The gulls sail over me, holding almost still in the air. Everything is busy in a slow way.
    In the orchard the branches are so heavy with ripening fruit that they nearly touch the ground. Some of the pears have fallen off the trees. You can hear the buzz of the wasps that come to eat them.
    In my own garden the lettuce and peas have been gone for a long time, but we’ve had my beans for five different meals. My tomatoes are red and fat. In the big garden the corn that was only a few inches high when I first came is now over my head. Each afternoon Grandmama goes out and fills her apron with enough ears of corn for dinner. As we sit on the back porch shucking corn we can see the rabbits nibbling on the parsley. Grandmama shrugs her shoulders. “The parsley has bolted and is no good anyhow,” she says.
    Even at night there is something. Last night when we turned on the porch light we saw a flying squirrel glide down from the poplar tree to the bird feeder. And there are things you can hear but can’t see, like the owl that hoots in the distance and the crickets singing in the dark.
    When I wake up in the morning, I don’t think about going home anymore. Instead, I wonder if I will find something new that day, and I’m never disappointed. Even when I walk into Greenbush. Tommy must have told the other children in town that I’m not poison because they talk to me now. There’s a girl named Betty who’s just my age. We sit on the drugstore steps. I made her a bracelet out of shells. Today