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It was great to visit Mom’s house. She had pie. Blueberry pie.
Oh man, golden crusts bulging with thousands and thousands of summer-flavored blueberries, just the right amount of sweet and that touch of tart that freshens up the tongue, making it ready for another and another and another bite. It was so good I couldn’t wait to find out where she bought it.
Yeah, bought it there’s no shame in that. The last time you wanted a new car, did you dig your own iron mine? Well, if it works for a Chevy
Besides, if you don’t buy ’em, how else do you get those thousands and thousands of berries? You have to pick ’em. Yourself.
Now I’ve picked a fair number of berries of a variety of varieties straw-, rasp-, black- and blue n and taken a reasonable pleasure in doing so. But then, the great bulk of such picking has been strictly hand-to-mouth not a particularly productive technique when the ultimate objective is pie.
When it comes to berries, I do fairly well with the picking part. It’s the putting in the pail where I find myself demonstrably disabled.
Let the record show that from time to time I’ve had reasonable success in picking apples, grapes, plums and even pears, not to mentions tomatoes, peas, green beans, sweet corn, summer squash and kale (though the latter was strictly at my mother’s behest, and I’ve yet to bring myself to swallow a mouthful of the stuff).
But putting me and a bucket in a berry patch is both an exercise in futility and an invitation to digestive disaster. Y’see, berries are the popcorn of the plant world bite-sized nibblers, that pop into the mouth one-two-three and, bursting with juicy goodness as they are, never taste better than when snarfed down in the heat of the sun and the heat of the moment, occasional ant and all.
(OK, popcorn is a plant, but, for the moment, let’s let that detail slide.)
If we all took our Sunday supplication to “lead us not into temptation” seriously, the berry patch would be further off limits than any bar or brothel. I daresay, Mother Teresa herself couldn’t have come out of a patch of ripe blueberries with a pink tongue. As for a sinner such as myself, forget the pie and pass the Imodium.
I confess, as a berry-picker, I leave much to be desired. And I have no real desire to rectify this failing.
Beyond what I eat, I really don’t like to pick berries.
I’ve seen the sign along the roadside “U-PIK-M” and a bunch of grinning cartoon berries and wondered if do-it-yourself dentistry and the home colonoscopy kit can be far behind. Strawberries grow on the ground where my feet belong, not my knees, which have no shoes and socks to protect them from rocks, stones and other sharp-edged indignities. Raspberries and blackberries grow among the thorns which pierce and scratch and put my long-overdue tetanus booster to the test. Blueberries grow best where bears live. Nuff said.
And with the bears, the thorns and the incipient arthritis comes the sun, the sweat and the ’skeeters. Not to mention the nettles, back spasms and the occasional pointedly disgruntled yellow jacket.
It’s enough to send a strong man scurrying to the supermarket.
But then there’s to be found a pain of another kind. One glance at the berries along the produce aisle and a guy appreciates that OPEC has really been playing piker. Gas at three bucks a gallon n ha! Raspberries are going for better than five bucks a pint on sale. Want a gallon of blackberries? You can darn near fill your SUV for the price.
It’s enough to get a guy wondering if somehow Ritz Crackers dosed with Berry Blue Kool-Aid might bake up a credible mock blue-berry pie even if the recipe isn’t on the box.
But there were no crackers in Mom’s pie. No Kool-Aid either. Just blueberries, crust and the stuff that makes em stick together and taste good. I had two pieces. With ice cream. And coffee.
No nettles, no ’skeeters and no sore knees. No Imodium either.
It was berry good. Berry, berry good.
Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3522 or jchristenson@winonadailynews.com
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Gerunds Participles and Pepperoni wrote on Jul 19, 2007 10:04 AM: