It’s a Blue Summer
 
I love blueberries.  Some people may think "so what?" when I state my love for the sweet, round, purple-y/blue anti-oxidant packed fruit.  Lots of people like blueberries.  But considering that I was forced into child labor as a reluctant and downright scarred Blueberry Picker back in the 70's, it's quite astonishing that they are still my favorite fruit.  Even thru all the flashback hell.  Sure, everyone should feel sad about A LOT of injustices, cruelty, and horrible news stories played endlessly over and over, but have you ever heard about the children who were forced to pick blueberries in JULY along the Eastern Seaboard? Grab a hankie...      Every summer I used to vacation in Truro, MA with my relatives from New York:  Aunt Jean and my cousins, Ellen, Sue, Jane and Rob.  We were all about 3 years apart from each other, which was awesome for me because I always had someone to play with at some point growing up.    Truro is very far out, almost to the tip of Cape Cod, right before Provincetown.  We stayed for 3 weeks and rented a huge old, haunted (that's another story) house on Old Country Road at the base of the cranberry shrub hills.  There weren't any other houses around us, which was perfect for 5 slightly rambunctious kids who tended to get in a wee bit of trouble every now and then.  But we were pretty isolated and were left to roam for miles without parental supervision, which was just awesome and of course would never happen in this day and age.  As long as we didn't break or enter the 5:00 pm cocktail circle, we could do whatever the hell we wanted and mostly did.    We could hike out to the dunes and climb to the top and jump off 15 feet below, landing in gallons of soft white sand.  The biggest decision of the day was should we go to the Bay beach or the Ocean beach?  Aunt Jean would consult her tide book and if we felt like being lazy and playing sand tag or hunting for sea glass it was a Bay beach day.  If we felt like body surfing, it was an Ocean beach day.   Oh the decisions.   It all sounds so classic and nostalgic, doesn't it?   Well that would all end when we would wake up one morning to a bit of hazy, humid fog and a bunch of empty old milk cartons sitting on the kitchen table.  That was when Aunt Jean and my mom, Betty, would decide it was a perfect day for blueberry picking.  They are soul sisters of obsession when it comes to accumulating blueberries.  You could see them eying us and calculating just how many quarts we could deliver to carry them through the next few years of having the “Aha! Moment”, when they could offer blueberry coffee cake to a guest in the middle of winter.   They grew up during the depression; enough said.  They would announce that we would not be going to the beach that morning due to the fog so instead "WE" are going blueberry picking!  WE = kids only.  Adults get to sit back at the house and drink coffee all morning.  They would pack us groaning kids into the station wagon and drive up and down those sandy roads until they found the perfect dusty, sandy, humid-filled, mosquito infested, blueberry patch, miles from the Truro homestead, ensuring our captivity.   If we were lucky, we would get a quick spray of OFF! and maybe a pint of lemonade, with just enough for 1 kid or 1 sip for 5 kids.  We would stand in the middle of the patch watching the tail lights disappear down the road, with a last instruction shouted from the window "Don't eat any of the blueberries!"    We were all gonna die.   We started picking and about 5 minutes into it, there were so many mosquitoes on us that we could not hear each other due to all the high-pitched buzzing from the flock attacking us.  Sue would yell at Jane.  Jane would yell at Rob, Ellen would tell everyone to shut up and we would all be quiet for at least 2 minutes and then the bickering would start all over again.    After several hours and once our mothers realized, "Oh shit, they've been there since 8:00 am, it's lunch time!" the station wagon would roll back up.  Exhausted, sweaty, bitten to a pulp, fingers stained semi-permanently purple, we would load up with our milk cartons, filled to the brim of sweet, juicy blueberries.  We were so exhausted we couldn't fight in the car on the way home.  Lunch would be ready; tuna fish wrapped in wax paper and then we would head to the Bay beach so that the salt water could salve our mosquito wounds.  It didn't matter how freaking hot it was that night upstairs in that haunted old house, we would fall asleep by 9:00 (except for Ellen who could read until her eyes fall out.)  But you know what?  The next morning the smell of those blueberry pancakes almost made it worth it.   And 15 years later when I would go back to visit my parents and my mom would break out the blueberry coffee cake Christmas morning, I was filled with pride because I picked that quart of blueberries.
Sunday, June 21, 2009