Think on This

By Sandy Long

Berry reverie

	TRR photo by Sandy Long A tempting basket of blueberries speaks of summer’s plenty. (Click for larger image)

There is a song that begins in spring—singular notes of bud and blossom and bee, joining up in a melody whose final full-blown symphony is of firm blue fleshy beads, adored by bears and human beings, alike.

I am humming that joyful tune as I grab a bucket and wander off into the blueberry bushes. The air is moist, gray and temperate, threatening more rain. The serried berries are bountiful, clinging like aphids along the branches. I nip and strip the scrubby bushes of their fruitful burden. Recently, it has rained and the grove is drenched in drops of water. This adds a certain pleasure to the picking, as my hands are continuously rinsed in rainwater. Again and again, I shake them free of clinging berry stems, then weave my fingers back into the gnarly branches, plucking, tugging, tipping the purple nibs into the bucket.

Soon, it begins to happen, the hazy slide of contentment envelops me, a blissful fog falls over everything—the bees buzzing about the fruity steam, my hair dampening into ringlets. Any troubles I carried into the patch with me begin to dissipate like mist at dawn—suddenly, simply gone.

I glide from bush to bush, always seeking better, bigger, to fill the bucket faster, though I know the small ones pack the flavor more powerfully in their little purses. Families go traipsing by and I think—everyone should bring a child along for this, sing blueberry songs, tell tall tales of great charm around the plink and plunk of harvest, hide among the rows of purple jewels, peeking through a fruited branch, sampling a bead or two, whistling and whispering through the blue dream of berry- gathering on a Sunday afternoon.

As a child, my parents often took us picking. Spring was framed by the luscious stain of strawberry- gathering. I remember leaning into dense patches of stunningly fragrant fruit, nearly drooling at the red orbs bursting with juice under leathery canopies of leaves. Summer, of course, was all about those berries of blue and their silverish sheen, inky tongues at the height of sun-season. Apples announced autumn, the return to classrooms, and riding hay wagons into hilly orchards, tumbling from the back into the long late summer grass, mounting wooden ladders, lunging for the largest globes which dangled like the dearest temptation, just beyond reach.

I often brought a friend along, wanting to share this wondrous thing. A photo rests in a drawer somewhere, my best friend lifting the largest apple I’ve ever seen into the sky, grin split wide. Not far away in the frame, her blonde-haired head bobs, barely bigger than the ruby fruit. Both freckled, both full of life.

Interesting how it goes in orchards, fields and groves, that the mind, let loose to ramble, roams its own corridors, while the body prances through its pleasant chores. The simple things drift back and linger as the heart remembers—the first dog you ever loved, the last friend who moved away, the day you plucked a bucket full of berries in the sun, while your thoughts ran on and on and on...