Obsession Alert: Wild Blueberries
Perhaps you'll find your blueberry obsession too.
It’s mid-July, the wild blueberries are abundant, and my berry obsession has ripened. Not eating (though I do that too), but picking. Whole gallons of wild blueberries, destined for jam, pies, and to be shared with friends and family. I’m not sure if what I have is an obsession, a compulsion, or merely a passion. But when the blueberries call to me with their tiny little blueberry voices (“I’m ripe. Pick me!”), I must obey.
My routine goes as follows. Wake up early, brew a mug of coffee, dress in my head-to-toe tick-proof outfit, tie a string around my belt loop long enough to secure a quart container at my left hip (a necessity for efficient picking), and head out the door. Blessed with a surfeit of blueberry bushes in the back field, I stroll from bush to bush, picking a single berry here and there, stopping when I find one with sprays of ripe berries.
Some days, I pick alone with my thoughts, listening to birdsong and the neighbor’s rooster; other days I listen to a nature-themed audiobook (currently Fen, Bog & Swamp by Annie Proulx.) Or sometimes I compose like I am today, bending and reaching, turning over leaves, letting my mind wander as I think about how to express this experience in words. It’s fun to pick with a friend, catching up as we fill our containers, but I treasure my solitude too.
Over the years, I have developed a relationship, of sorts, with each of the bushes and their berries, which ripen early and which ripen late. I know which have the tiny, nearly black shiny berries, and which have the larger, chalkier blues. The previous owners of the property must have shared my blueberry obsession and planted some too, for there are also a few bushes with obesely curvaceous cultivated berries, the Kim Kardashians of the blueberry world.
As I wander from bush to bush, I examine each clump of berries to select by subtle gradations in color and feel those that are fully ripe from those that are still ripening. A ripe berry gives under the fingertips, releasing from its stem rather than holding on, like a teenager pulled early from bed. Overripe berries squish in my fingers and get eaten, the sweetest berries on the bush. Many ripen in clusters like a group of friends getting ready for a party at the same time. Then I can pull off three, four, five, sometimes six berries in one go. There’s a brief moment of disappointment when a blueberry rolls from my finger to the ground, and I console myself with the thought that perhaps that lost berry will sprout.
Picking engages the eyes as well as the fingers— so many shades in each clump as they ripen from pale, almost mint green, through lavender to deep blue. The teeny tiny berries are probably my favorite even though they take much longer to fill my container; their petite size somehow makes them exceedingly adorable, and their flavor is incomparable. (If you’ve grown up with giant, sweet, flabby supermarket blueberries, the intense flavor of a wild blueberry is a revelation.) And when both the birds and I miss picking ripe berries, then you get little blueberry raisins hanging from branches, winter food for the birds.
The small, precise, repetitive movements required to pick relax me. I am, as the mindfulness types put it, “in the moment.” There is a contentment in gathering from the land, the ancient compulsion to find and store enough food to last the winter, though in this case it merely means having enough jars of blueberry jam to keep my husband happy.
No surprise, wild blueberries are much healthier than cultivated, with higher concentrations of antioxidants and all sorts of things that are exceedingly good for you. Add in the benefits of being out in nature, the ability to gift berries to friends and family (and cook up pies and muffins and jams), and you get a very healthy obsession. Take a look at that unassuming bush in your yard. Perhaps you have wild blueberries too.
P.S. I also feature wild blueberries in my novels. My characters pick berries in magical fields, they fall in love over wild blueberry muffins, they make blueberry jam to enter into the Ag Fair. Recipes included! A bonus snippet from Sheepish:
As she walked through the field, Aly noticed a spray of tiny berries on an otherwise undistinguished bush, a few pale green, some ripening to purple, others a dark, inky blue. She pulled one off. A wild blueberry, only a fraction of the size of a grocery store berry. She popped it into her mouth. It was sweet and tart and delicious, as if all the flavor of a bigger berry had been compressed to a miniature size. She dug a plastic bag from her backpack and began picking. On some bushes, the sprays of berries were so thick and ripe she could pick five, six, seven with a gentle tug of her fingers. Others were still half green, promises for the future. With the sun warming her shoulders and a light breeze blowing, she felt as if she’d been transported back in time.
"I’m not sure if what I have is an obsession, a compulsion, or merely a passion." May your obsessive-compulsive passion never fade. This essay is as delicious as your jam (which my husband still talks about…)
I have blackberry bushes in my backyard and I feel the same, although with more intense competitive feelings about the birds.