Blueberries

Uncharacteristically, we seemed to have missed much of blueberry season this year. It hasn't been the same, to be sure, since a couple of years ago someone converted the open field just down Ash Point Road, where free picking with the girls was a regular event of the summer, into a cemetery. Still, we've usually had a pie by now, and to leave our first hike to Beech Hill and its blueberry fields until the 24th of August seems criminal. Will we be allowed back into the state?

It's not the same to pay for them at a farm stand, even one as lovely as Beth's. A pie baked with berries you've picked in a field just tastes better. You know that all those berries would just have gone to waste if you hadn't happened by, you feel just a tiny bit that you're living off the land, as you eat that pie, the crick in your back stirs up something primitive. A few handfuls from Beech Hill are nice but a few quarts from your own private patch are heavenly.

When I go back to MA later this week, I could stop at a roadside stand advertising "Blueberrys" and stock up for a pie back home. There's a lot of choice this year, for the number of stands corresponds directly to the state of the economy. But I probably won't stop. The end of summer is poignant enough without invoking memories of the blue lips of children.