I've been working on a collection of vignettes about my grandmother, who was known as “Big Mama” by all of her grandchildren. She was originally a Southerner, but as a child, I spent time with her in Vermont every summer.
The blueberry field is at the top of a hill at the end of a dirt road. It stretches for miles to your young mind. You carry your little grey tin pail with its semicircle handle. Your grandma walks beside you, more slowly on her short legs.
Big Mama holds a blue-and-white enamel bowl, she’s wearing a flowery nylon house dress. You reach the middle of a field where there’s a great pile of dark-gray boulders. You’ve heard in the past it was a turret and wish so much that it still was, just as in the fairytale stories. But the boulders lie scattered, surrounded by blueberry bushes, knee-high.
Big Mama bends forward, her dress goes up in the back, and she samples a few berries.
“Lawd, don’t these taste gooood!”
You scan the area for the thickest, bluest bushes. The wild berries are tiny—smaller than peas, bigger than juniper berries. You taste along the way, handfuls come off easily in one tug of a bush. The first few minutes are the loud plunks, just like in the story Blueberries for Sal. “Kerplunk.” Then they get quieter and quieter as the bottom of the pail fills with soft dark blue. You keep moving every few minutes, sure that the next bush has more than this one.
Big Mama sits in the middle of the field and doesn’t move her spot but once or twice. She is part of the hillside, she’s not talking (that’s strange!), she picks and picks right there until her bowl is full. The field stretches out around her—she’s a painted boat in a blue-green sea.
Maybe an hour, maybe less or more. Then she hoists herself up to her feet with a little groan.
“Ah ’clare these are the purtiest berries ah ever did see.”
Time to go home, you walk over to her, compare pails—she always has more, even though you covered more area. The walk home is easy downhill, but you hold the precious pails with care. Spilling any berries is cause for great remorse and even tears.
These days are filled with blueberry pancakes, blueberry syrup, blueberry pie, blueberry cobbler, blueberry jam, and the favorite—blueberry teacake with sugar on top.
It’s July in Vermont.