Keeping berries

We checked the clock and consulted the GPS system in Connie’s Honda and came to the same conclusion.
“It looks like we’re going to roll into town just about the same time as the Welcome Back to Portland parade,” I said.
My wife agreed that that would be fitting, since we were coming back from a two-week vacation Sunday afternoon.
“Trouble is,” I said, “we don’t have any candy to toss from the car.”
“We could throw blueberries,” she responded.
Nope. No chance of that. Those blueberries weren’t going anywhere but home to the refrigerator.
I’d picked the berries Friday morning with my 8-year-old niece at a place on the other side of Patten Hill, near the cabin that’s been in my wife’s family for nearly 100 years.
Blueberry picking is something of a New Hampshire tradition each summer, at least for our family.
My niece had already been to the Patten Hill U-pick place twice this summer — once with her mother and once with a day camp group. She’d also been picking twice on Pitcher Mountain, a not very strenuous climb up to an expanse of wild blueberry bushes.
The Pitcher Mountain berries were small this year, like BBs but delicious. The U-pick berries were bigger and come from cultivated blueberry bushes that were planted about 1992.
While we went picking, Connie and her sister worked on one of their endless little cabin improvement projects together.
The weather was perfect, as it had been for most of the two weeks, with a crystal blue sky and temperatures in the mid 70s. We got there early, beating the other pickers.
But the first two or three bushes I picked were bare, as if someone had come along with a vacuum and sucked all the berries off the branches. There had been some serious picking going on before we arrived.
Finally, after wading about three or four rows into a mass of bushes, I found berries worth picking. And with the first plink-plunk in the bucket I thought of all of the other berry picking trips and the countless times I’d read the children’s book “Blueberries for Sal” to my daughters.
We split up as we picked. I concentrated on the higher branches, while my niece had an eye for particularly fat, juicy berries. She also had a tendency to eat almost as many as she put in her bucket.
Slowly, over the course of more than an hour, our buckets began to fill up. My niece grew bored and was a little impatient with me, but I couldn’t really blame her. It was her fifth picking session of the summer.
“Let’s go and pay,” she said, more than once.
And she led me to the porch of a nearby farmhouse where an old woman was ready to weigh our berries and settle our account.
She offered us an option. We could either pay a fixed price per pound for all the berries we had picked or we could have half of our berries for free and give the woman the other half. She’d then sell them at a farm stand at a higher price, making a profit on our labor.
I didn’t hesitate.
Our berries were our berries. I wasn’t about to give half of them away. So I gladly paid her and we headed back to the cabin, where Connie and I would be packing to head back home the next day.
All of that came back to me Sunday as we negotiated our way around the parade traffic to get to our house.
Throw the blueberries out to the crowd? Not on your life. You folks can go pick your own.[[In-content Ad]]