little things that make life good
So I'm sitting here, reading my email with a bowl of plain ol' Cheerios. There is a generous handful of fresh blueberries floating in them. As I try to get a bite of cereal with only one or two blueberries (so they last through the whole bowl) I am struck with a flashback.
As a child, I grew up on KI Sawyer AFB in the UP (Upper Peninsula of Michigan) and there were so many blueberries in the woods around post. The best berries were around the base lake, where you had to fight hoards of mosquitoes to the right to the sweet, fat berries. We would go out every summer and pick buckets. We would have the big plastic ice cream buckets....eat one, throw one in the bucket.
At first it was hard to keep putting a berry in the bucket, that one lone berry looked so small compared to the huge white bucket, but soon enough the bucket was too heavy to hold and we were hot and sweaty and tired....and tired of eating berries.
But later there was playing with the berries as we dunked them in the filled kitchen sink to wash off the grime. And soon there were bowls of Cheerios, homemade pancakes, muffins and bowls of milk and sugar....all blessed with heaping piles of blueberries. We had so many that there was no need to be stingy. We would freeze buckets of berries to enjoy all winter long, running out in the spring. Then it was the waiting game again, watching all summer, looking to see if the berries were big enough to pick. Somehow we forgot the bug bites and willingly rode our bikes out to the lake for another picking season.
But now, blueberries are an overpriced indulgence 99% of the year. I can't pay $4 for a tinny tiny little plastic square of minuscule fruit. But yesterday a big container was only $2 so I splurged and right now....I think it was definitely worth it. Who knows? Maybe I can convince my dad to pick some for me and mail them to Texas.....