Judy P's Tickle Trunk

….Blueberry heaven that is, blue gold, Newfie tea¹…..

 The call came early: “Want to go berry-picking?” The response was swift “Yes, indeed I do?” Me and blueberries go way back and even as a kid I never turned down an invitation to go picking. My first watercolour was a bunch of blueberries and I embroidered them on table linens and aprons for a few years when hand-made crafts were in their heyday. Locally hand-made crafts, that is; the stuff in the stores now is also hand-made but likely by small children in foreign countries for ha’pennies an hour. I digress.

“Bauline Blueberries” 1982

Berry picking with Mary and Brian is not a stroll across a meadow with a tin cup to fill. It is an all-day affair and can take one well off the beaten path. Our destination this time was down the woods roads on the Baie Verte peninsula to the old cut-overs. (The only thing a blueberry bush likes better than a cut-over is a burn-over.) There was some urgency on this particular adventure because it was late in the season and many berries were already over-ripe and starting to decline. Any night could bring a hard frost and that would be the end of them all.

Over-ripe.

We drove down the gravel road at speeds known only to Nascar drivers. Our buckets rattled in the back, the tea sloshed out of our cups and only our seatbelts kept us from flying out the door on the turns. We passed several groups of moose hunters coming out the road. In whose mind was it wise to have moose hunting season overlap with berry season? I wished I had worn an orange toque.

The berry grounds…

….cut-overs on the Baie Verte peninsula.

Oh that fresh Newfoundland air. I sucked in a good lung or two full before I grabbed my containers and followed Brian, Mary and Molly over the granite and the wind-falls to the berry patch. They were plentiful and almost overwhelming.

Ripe for the picking.

Plenty of partridgeberries.

Not only were the blueberries in abundance but the partrdgeberries were also there and almost ripe. I had myself in a real tizzy for a while, trying to pick both varieties at once but after accidentally throwing the hard red partridgeberries in with the blues a couple of times and having to pick them out one by one, I gave up the dualism and focused on filling my buckets with only blueberries. It was a perfect day; only a scattered fly, for which I was prophylactically anointed in repellent, and not hot so that you baked nor so cold that your fingers were not nimble. I marvelled at how I had gone so many years without this particular enjoyment. I just don’t know where to find berries in this quantity in Nova Scotia.

I once heard an acquaintance in St. John’s (she who was known only as White) tell a friend that berry picking is “so cosmic”. I don’t know about that, but it is certainly a zen thing where the mind settles into the process and one picks one berry, then another , then another……”No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind; no color, sound, smell, taste, touch or what the mind takes hold of, nor even act of sensing.”² When I was done this particular day, and standing in the road, suddenly I could feel an awful itching at the back of my neck (A little plastic Frenchy’s tag), my few flybites sang misery, my damp jeans chafed my kneecaps, and every loose hair was a-tickling. Surely these things were present most of the day but I had known nought but berries.

Big blue bunches of berries.

Not only had I forgotten how much I enjoyed berry picking, I had also forgotten how much of a work-out it is. The terrain is very rough with streams and piles of granite chunks, dead-falls, holes and roots and up and down and over and across. I was okay for the first bucket and got a second wind after Mary and I lunched on our favourite berry picking picnic items: egg salad and Coke (I don’t recall Brian stopping to eat) but come two or three o’clock my legs were no longer cooperating and I had to cut a stick to support myself to scamper from one rock to the next across a stream to get home. That bucket was heavy and its cargo precious. I’ve been tired before. After a weekend of solo sailing I have been so tired that I would eat standing in front of the microwave barely able to bear the weight of my own eyelashes, but that doesn’t hold a candle to how tired I got trying to keep pace with Mary and Brian berry-picking.

Good golly, Miss Molly, how did you know?

When I decided it was time to head back to the truck I wasn’t sure which way to go. I knew the direction but not the best route and had only enough reserve to get there, not enough to bush-whack. I was picking a last selection of particularly nice berries that couldn’t be passed and thinking “I bet if Molly was here I could follow her right to the truck” and no sooner had I thought it than there she was, appearing from out of nowhere. I heard that dogs can sense fear but never that they could sense a poor mortal’s feeling of desperation. I stood up and she ran ahead a few meters, then stopped, looked back to see that I was doing okay, then led on another few meters. In this manner she led me right to the truck along the most efficient path. Could it be that she has some herding instinct and I was looking as woolly as a lost sheep? Judge for yourself:

Friend of Gandalf? Naw, just one of the Blue-fingered Rubber-booted Tribe.

By the time I was done I had to clutch handfuls of my pants to lift my legs into the truck.The drive home took twice as long. Not because we were tired or that the road was any worse or that it was coming on to dusk but because the berries were late season and very fragile and too much jiggling in the buckets would break them down and make them juicy and thus difficult to sort for cleaning and freezing.

The precious cargo.

Brian navigated the dirt roads as carefully as if he were carrying a shipment of TNT through a lightening storm. The contrast between the trip out and the trip back reminded me of a Norman Rockwell painting from the Saturday Evening Post in 1947 called “Outing” or “Coming and Going”.

That night, as I settled into bed after jamming and canning and packaging for freezer, I had, not visions of sugarplums dancing in my head, but soft velvety blue berries with bright green leaves, and shiny bright red berries with deep green glossy leaves against the deep grey of the stumps and the light grey of the sky. Berry heaven.

¹ – apologies to the author of The Ballad of Jed Clampett

² – excerpt from the Prajna Paramita Hridaya, Heart of Perfect Wisdom chant.

© Judy Parsons 2015

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