Wineberry Birthday

I moved into a new house when I was 7 or 8 years old. There was a thicket of wineberry bushes lining my driveway, providing the most succulent sweet-tart berries that ripened for only two weeks in July. Every year for the next ten years, I had wineberries and chocolate cake for my July 26th birthday. When I was in high school, our neighbor decided to build herself a new stone castle. Trucks mowed over the bushes to access the construction site, and only one small wineberry plant lived into the next year. Now, four years later, there are four wineberry bushes. After graduating from college and returning home for the summer, I ate wineberries and chocolate cake for my birthday for the first time since high school, and it felt like home.