Washing blueberries. Blueberry syrup for supper pancakes. Spying the biggest and plumpest berry as I sorted out stems, I popped it into my mouth. As the sweet blue of the juice filled my mouth, memories of blueberry picking days flooded my heart. Jumbled images of trying to stand in the tiniest sliver of shade to keep hot burning sand out of our tennis shoes; Beverly silent on the other side of the towering bush as we concentrated on picking on the darkest dusty blue berries; lunch holding white bread peanut butter sandwhiches in our blue stained hands and drinking chilly pump water. Picking up our buckets of labor we trudged up to the shed. Standing in line we would unbuckle our belts and set down our two pound picking pails. We would hope for maybe ten pounds of picked berries to be recorded on our punch cards. Boys finally free for the day would tussle around pushing and joking, but mostly hoping no one would notice how many green berries and stems they had weighed into their buckets. A seeming life time ago. I checked to see if I had any stain on my teeth before I turned to the stove for syrup making, recalling we often left the fields with blue stained lips. Those tell tale signs of how much we loved blueberries.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 15:31:45 +0000
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