God Bless Blueberry Season
Berry picking as a summer staple
Blueberry season: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I’ve been going to pick berries more summers than I haven’t for over twenty years now. Here in my corner of the Midwest, blueberry season begins around mid-June, which is also when my son’s birthday is. The fact that I was picking berries the week before he was born means that his birthday and blueberries are forever joined in my mind. I was especially eager for this year’s crop because between the weather and my schedule last summer, I didn’t get to pick any. It’s not an exaggeration to say that my summer felt off kilter last year. To make up for that lack, I have spent two mornings among the blueberries this week.
Each year I am reminded that the aisles of a berry farm are teeming with life. I’ve overheard fellow pickers talk about seeing black snakes wending their way around branches, but thank goodness that’s not the kind of life I’ve encountered. In the morning, the air is full of birdsong and the drone of flies and wasps. If I’ve gone to pick in the evening, the whine of mosquitoes keeps my hands busy dropping berries into my bucket and smacking the opportunistic creeps. On occasion I’ve pulled off a handful of berries only to realize that a tiny pale green spider has hitched a ride on my fingers.
The people who pick blueberries are interesting specimens, too. If I am by myself, I love to listen to the snatches of conversation that come from further down the aisle or even an aisle or two away. The gossip filtering toward me makes me think sometimes the bushes have turned into a confessional booth with everyone sharing what ails them, keeps them up at night, makes them mad, or breaks their hearts, but I am not a very good priest because I only listen to a few moments of one story before my ears alight on another thread of conversation moving my way. Today I overheard:
“When I’m down in the dumps, I go to the kitchen. . .”
“I heard the farm down in Neosho closed a couple years ago. . .”
“I didn’t know he started going to counseling again. . .”
“He will be done after the grief sharing class. . .”
People can’t check their problems at the weigh station, and they follow at each man and woman’s heels until they are laid out among the sunlight and grass. I have found myself hoping that maybe because the berry pickers spent time with their berry-picking companions and the patient berries themselves they leave the field with a measure of peace.
Over the years I’ve also listened to many tutorials from mothers to children: “Don’t pick the green berries. Only pick the dark blue berries.” The excited squeals of the child, “Mom, look! Look! Look over here! This bush has so many berries!” that will soon turn into, “When are we leaving? I’m bored. How many more blueberries do you have to pick?” The last few years, I smile when I hear that conversation because it is one I participated in a long time ago. My son would check my bucket to see how full it was and then ask if we were staying until it was half-full or all-the-way full. Eventually he got old enough to stay home while I went to the berry farm, and now it’s been a long time since I’ve had to worry about a little one tagging along with me.
These days I usually go alone, and it feels like therapy or church. If I can find a quieter corner of the field to work in, I listen to the hum of conversation that drifts my way, the music of the voices rising and falling in the heavy summer air, and I am stilled knowing that I am somehow alone and not alone in this green and blue enclosure. Sometimes I will hum to myself or pray or string together lines of poetry in my mind. A peace descends whether I stand or kneel in between the blueberry bushes. They don’t ask anything of me. They invite me to be with them. Sometimes to get to the berries at the center of a great old bush, I must literally step into the embrace of the branches until I am surrounded. If it has been a scorcher of a morning and I walk back to my car dripping with sweat, I carry the blueberries and stillness with me.
My ritual upon returning home is to immediately dump them in a big colander and rinse, rinse, rinse. I eat berries while I am rinsing, and then I dump them onto a towel-lined baking sheet to dry before I freeze most of them. I always save out a few cups of berries in a shallow container that I keep uncovered in the fridge. The following days find me wandering through the kitchen and snagging a handful of berries three or four times a day. It is possible to find good berries at the grocery store, but not like this. Sweet, tangy berries allowed to ripen to their fullest and then carted five whole miles to my kitchen. There is no other time of year like this (well, apple season might trump this for me, but I seem to be outliving all the regional u-pick apple orchards, which is a great tragedy).
The price for u-pick berries has been on a steady incline the last few summers, but I’ll keep paying what they ask because the grocery story can’t give me everything else that comes with a summer morning spent in the aisle of a berry farm.
