Monday, November 06, 2006

Blueberries on Cape Cod:

One summer in my teen years, my family rented a lightly furnished place in Cape Cod for two weeks by a beach. We swam, played in the sand, hunted shells and wandered way out on the sand flats. My parents talked to natives and friends visiting there, and time and again people praised the blueberries. They were ripe, they were delicious, there was nothing like Cape Cod Blues just now, and … whenever we asked where to go pick them, the subject mysteriously changed to other matters.

One morning after breakfast my father gathered up pots, bowls, anything clean that looked like it could hold stuff.
“What are you doing?” we asked.
“We’re going to pick blueberries,” he said.
“But Joe,” my mother said, “nobody’s told you where to find them.”
“We’ll find them,” he said.
We stacked all his containers in the car, hopped in and he drove off. Dad drove around for awhile, finally stopping at a sandy roadside, beyond which we could see a some shrub-filled “bottoms”.
“This looks good,” he said.
We got out of the car, walked past the little sandy dunes, and we were awash in blueberries, wonderful, delicious ones, far more than we could possibly eat, or pick and take home.

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