Escape from Grey Gardens

"Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries..."

Only today we were blueberrying, at Blueberry Ridge, one of the several pick-your-own orchards an hour or so away. Gary says we have these mainly because the Ag school at LSU was promoting raising bluberries 20 years or so ago, and for awhile they were a very popular crop, but the market got saturated. I'm glad a few remain, and most of them are organic farms. The berries are not just better and lusher and sweeter, but also inexpensive (today it was 75 cents/pound). We do this once a year, mid June to early July is the best, and we feast on fresh until we almost turn blue, but freeze enough to give us blueberry pancakes and the odd pie long into the winter. To me they taste like summer.

Picking is pleasantly mindless. I prefer blueberries to strawberries since there is no crouching or bending. You pick a row that has the variety you want, walk down through the row until you find exactly the bush you want, carefully avoiding any fire ant hills, then pull down the best limb to a comfortable height and have at it. After an hour one hand is blue and you get dizzy from the heat. Today they were just right, and it was like the bushes were handing us the berries. Every year I think of a couple of poems: Plath's "Blackberrying" because of the rows, and the "squandering on my fingers" line but also because there are some wild blackberries growing up in a couple of the blueberry rows. I don't pick many of these because of the stickers, and those I do, I usually eat right there. It's like an extra treat. I also think of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" because of the "bee-loud glade" (nobody ever said anything quite so perfectly as that) since there are bees buzzing about and lots of sticky, fallen fruit. Peace comes dropping slow, with each little plop into the bucket.

We decided to put in a few bushes at GGLA, but I hope we still make the annual trek. The drive up is pretty, and it's just far enough away to make it an outing, an event, and it has come to signify that summer is in full swing.

We have some cherries leftover from being seduced by them last week at Whole Foods, so I think I'll make a cherry and blueberry clafoutis tonight for a Father's Day treat. I'm no cook but I know how to do this.

And Dad, somewhere out there in the ether, I'm thinking of you, miss you, wish you could see Grey Gardens Louisiana on a sunny Sunday afternoon, buckets of blueberries on the kitchen counter, and me with a thousand things to do to get ready for this trip but sitting here woolgathering about Yeats and summer and recipes.

Next father's day, Gary will be a grandfather. Imagine that.