On Blueberries
A moment during the harvest!
Welcome to the Tuesday post for all subscribers, about a magical blueberry harvest moment I experienced this June. On Friday, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for a blueberry mojito. As always and ever, thank you for being here. If you want to learn more about who I am and what I do, you can check out my portfolio.
A few weeks ago, I took an unplanned trip to Pennsylvania and stopped for a day at my parents’ farm. In the three years since they’ve owned the property, I had never been there at this particular moment in the harvest season: berry time. Normally, I save my visits for later in the summer, when the garden is full to bursting and the amount of produce picked every day is almost comical.
The berry bushes are kept in a bed with a cage over them, leftover from the previous owners. They’re unwieldy, and full of twists and tangles of branches, some studded with thorns waiting to catch you and others soft with leaves and heavy with berries. The strawberries were my favorite, hiding under a canopy of leaves and waiting to be rescued from a mildew-y fate. But the blueberries bewitched me.
I had never picked blueberries before. I had never seen them hanging on their branches, luminous with a million shades of purples and blues and pinks. The colors stopped me in my tracks: I had only seen them before in the sky at sunset. It was almost as if each berry had a tiny light inside it, making it glow in the late afternoon sun. Remember those ornaments that you could plug into a light? That’s what I mean.
The berries were covered in a perfect patina, smooth and dusty like the surface of a lightbulb that has gone unchanged. I wondered how I had never noticed the dust before, and as soon as I reached out to touch them, I realized why: from the moment my finger brushed the berry, even in an accidental glance of a finger, the dust was disturbed. Each berry I picked came with my finger prints on it.
I put the ripe berries into a container as I emptied the branches, and watched it out of the corner of my eye as the berries changed character. First, the dust disappeared, almost as if the oil from my fingers was spreading across the surface of each berry. The longer they sat, the more faded their colors became. The light inside of them seemed to go out.
Don’t get me wrong—the berries were still delicious and magical to eat, still warm from the sun and soft-skinned. But watching the berries change after I had picked them reminded me of a fact that I inherently know but often forget: that our produce is alive until we pluck it from the ground to eat. In the same way that meat tastes different when it is freshly sourced, so does our produce.
See you back here on Friday for blueberry mojitos!