Blueberries

For years Dad and I picked blueberries in the Summertime. Four bushes in the backyard produced overwhelming buckets of blueberries. Often it was my sister and I out there in the summer sun picking and stretching, reaching past limbs inside, wary of wasps and maybe spiders. But after she'd gone to college, Dad sometimes came out there to help. Each bush had its own personality. There was the skinny bush: tall, scrawny, and didn't produce many berries at all but I always checked it thoroughly just in case. A fat bush on the end, usually having the juiciest berries, lump and dark, but it made me nervous to stick my hand past the exterior limbs into the dark interior, fearful that a spider might get angry or wasps come flying out at my face. But Dad said it was important to get all the berries, every single one. So I braved the prospect of getting stung or bitten, pulling out vines that were invading the bush's territory. The other two bushes were mostly non-descript, average height and thickness, average berries, average. Sometimes I could come inside with two buckets of berries, sometimes more or less.

A few times when my sister Beth had friends over they'd join us picking berries. One time a few of us started throwing berries at each other, until someone said that blueberry juice stains and the friend didn't want to get her shirt stained. Nonetheless, I still wanted to play and snuck a couple more berry throws in before they got mad at me and made me leave.

I also loved the washing of the berries. In the sunny outdoors their color seemed dusty, muted and faded, but when the water ran over their skins, bright colors leapt from the colander: shiny maroon, indigo, dark purple, midnight, and speckled blue. As their cloudy skins brighten, my tastebuds craved the bursting tartness of a just-turned ripe berry, and I'd pop one or two in my mouth before someone would catch me sneaking a little snack.

The camaraderie of working together, bonding with family doing the same task, sometimes in silence, sometimes in laughter, was something that crept into my poetry. The reaching for the berry at the top of the tallest bush, tip-toed, leaning into the limbs, leaves in my face, I'd look up and be blinded by sunlight at the same time as I grasped the blueberry. This appeared in one of my poems, "Berry-Picking."