“Turn left,” I say, simultaneously pointing right.
Elliot presses harder on the brakes. “Which way?”
Forgoing relative directions, I say “that way!” emphasizing my pointing fingers.
“That’s not left”
“True,” I respond, “just follow where I point, not what I say.”
After a few more backwards directions, my friends and I land at Knight's Blue Maple Hill Farm.
“Alright, we’re here!” I announce.
“Where is it?” asks Elliot, surveying the rows of houses surrounding us. “There’s nowhere to turn off the main road.”
With a hint of cheerful sarcasm, I say “I don’t know, the internet says we’re here, so it must be true!”
Then Jacob adds, “Yea, mine says we’re here too, but I don’t see it either… Let’s keep driving around and maybe we’ll see an entrance.”
We wander around and after a turn, a turnaround, and another turn, slowly discover a road to the farm stand.
We park, and as we walk up, a bored high schooler puts down his thick paperback novel.
“Afternoon,” he says.
“Hey!” I respond. Then, stating the obvious because I’m excited, I say “We are here to pick Blueberries? There’s six, no- five of us, and some of us have never done this before, some of us haven’t been in over ten years (That’s me…), and some do this pretty often. How do we do this here?”
Grinning a little bit, he gestures to his left, no – right no – left, and says, “There’s pails here, grab one, and the blueberries are that direction.” He gestures to his right.
“Awesome,” I say, and we head to our left.
The blueberry bushes stretch ahead of us for what feels to me like forever.
I reach out and grab a handful of the biggest, bluest, freshest berries ever.
I roll them quickly, scanning for anything I don’t want to eat that might have decided to accompany the berries, and roll one between my fingers. The pale blue dusting trades the blueberries’ skin for mine; the dust reveals my fingerprints canvassing the blueberry, and the negatives are visible on my fingertips. As I add pressure and roll more, the dust completely leaves the berry, and the skin shines, reflecting a purple-blue sun. Its rigid firmness disintegrates, leaving a dense blueberry juice encased in a taut glowing capsule. I pop them all into my mouth. My canines first pierce the berries, their thick plump skin offers little resistance. The cool textured flesh pops out, assailing the roof of my mouth with tart, slightly acidic, blueberry juice. As I continue to bite down, the other berries are crushed by my molars, their insides flying horizontally, blanketing my tongue with their sweet natural sugars, their small amount of fiber quickly dissolves like cotton candy over my taste buds. My teeth meet each other lightly and begin to reset, and my tongue rearranges the medley of skins, seeds, and flesh that hadn’t been fully pushed out. I bite down once again – harder this time, and the skin, now folded over itself, gets crushed, releasing its bitterness. The small seeds resist the bite for a moment, but just as the full berries that came before them, don’t stand a chance, and collapse inward; with their bitterness, I get a full realization of the blueberries’ flavors: the light bitterness of their rich blue skin, the dark sweetness coupled with a slight sour of the inner flesh, and the sharp tangy bitter of the few seeds inside. I roll what solid remains are left around in my mouth; the crisply defined edges of the seed hulls press into my palate like a quill against parchment, my palate remembers their pattern the way paper remembers the path of a pen run dry. I chew once more, twice more, and, satisfied that I have removed all the flavor readily available, swallow the liquidated berries.
As the taste fades – first the sweet, then the sour acid, then, lastly, the bitter – I pick another handful and plink, plunk, kerplunk, thump drop them into my pail. I do this a few more times, and my pail looks like this:
I compose a short, low-quality parody about picking blueberries, some sort of medley between Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and my own inspiration, and then Kai begins reciting – by memory – ‘Blueberries’ actually by Frost himself:
"You ought to have seen what I saw on my way
To the village, through Mortenson's pasture to-day:
Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!
And all ripe together, not some of them green
And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!"
Read the whole poem here...
Frost actually taught at Amherst for about 40 years, and our main library is named after him, so it was fun and a bit more meaningful to hear some poetry by him.
As he recites, I repeat the cycle of pick, eat, plink, plunk, kerplunk and thump. Soon, our pails look like this:
Shortly after, the sun quite a bit lower in the sky than it had been when we started, we call it a day, pay for our blueberries, and drive back to Amherst.
