Blueberries

BLUEBERRIES

Blueberrying: trudging through woods and pasture, bitten and scratched by the fauna and flora; watching one's bucket fill slowly and then empty suddenly after a false step into a juniper bush that looked like solid ground to a kid; whining at Mother and getting scant sympathy ("I told you to wear long pants!); all under a blazing July sun mitigated only by the haze of 80-odd-percent humidity. Who needs that? You can buy blueberries, right?

Maybe. Maybe those big things in the supermarket, or even from the organic fruit farm, really are as good as the little wild ones of my childhood and my mother's youth. Maybe, as with so many scientifically engineered designer fruits and vegetables, we have bigger ones and/or more of them per plant or acre, but the amount of essential oils and nutrients per berry or plant or acre hasn't necessarily increased in proportion. I buy and use the big berries but I'm prejudiced against them.

Anyway, when the earth offers blueberries, it makes sense to accept. So Saturday morning found me at the back of the field behind the house, sitting on a milk crate under a big straw hat, plastic lidded container in hand, batting ineffectively at mosquitoes and waiting for daylight to advance enough that I could distinguish color and thus find the berries. Lady, make a note of this: quarter to five is too early.

These were low- or ground-bushes, eight or nine inches high; hence the milk crate. As kids we squatted or sat on the ground and quickly got hot and bored. The high bushes in the pasture, on the edge of the woods, or under the high-tension electric wires enjoyed plenty of blazing sun, but crouching down in the open field in mid-afternoon was particularly cruel and unusual.

We also picked and ate what we called dewberries, tiny things of the blackberry kind, spare and sour and seedy; and checkerberries, bright red skin over a white interior with a texture like water chestnuts and a mild wintergreen flavor, and the characteristic X at one end. We ate dewberries and checker-berries a few at a time on the spot. It was only the blueberries that we made any attempt to bring home and do something with --probably put on cereal -- but most of those got eaten on-site as well.

Ground-bush berries are conspicuous in small clusters at the top of the bush, two or three ripe ones and a few more green. I discovered that there are more berries down the side of the plant, one or two together, smaller than the ones up there in the sun. I found that there are more berries within arm's reach than it looks as though there would be. The cup and a half of berries I returned with doesn't seem like a lot for an hour's work; but have you checked out the price of organic wild blueberries lately?

For my mother, blueberrying may have been a communing-with-nature experience, although I doubt that she'd have thought of it that way. I can't report any Emersonian epiphany from this weekend's blueberrying experience. I observed, as I fished for dropped berries, the dense mat of moss, checkerberries and other field underbrush, and the tall grass pushing through here and there, the seed-heads brushing my face like bugs. I heard birds chirping and rustling in the trees, and mosquitoes shrilling in my ear. In the heavy, soggy air of a day that promised, and in due course delivered, the kind of weather I associate with blueberrying, I smelled the hay from the part of the field that was cut and drying; the checkerberries disturbed by the mower; the pines in the woods nearby; and, faint and far away, organic gasses released by the dump in the next town.

On balance, I was satisfied enough with my venture into hunting-and-gathering that I went out again on Sunday morning. It's rather like planting, tending and harvesting tomatoes and beans: Beans picked half an hour before dinner really do taste better even than beans from the local vegetable stand, and the tomatoes are cheaper. And they are unquestionably organic: I'll spring for $5 worth of fertilizer from the owners of the organic cows up the hill, but not for the pesticides, weed-killers and fertilizer the garden stores want you to buy. Even though seed and tomato plants and organic manure cost something and the self-watering planters rather a lot, and in spite of the labor-intensiveness of blueberrying, harvesting them gives me a heartwarming illusion of getting something for nothing.

LOOKING AT A KING

"A cat may looke on a King"
John Heywood, Proverbs (1546)

Trying to do something with one of the three cats that my
roommate and I harbored, I was getting, after the fashion of
cats, no respect. My then-boyfriend Danny was happy to explain
what I should be doing instead and to tell me how much better he
managed with the cats he lived with: "My cats obey me," he said.
His cats, indeed -- they belonged to the landlady. He doesn't
even like cats much.

A day or so later, one of "his" cats sat itself down under
the table in his room and showed no inclination to move. He
pointed at the door and ordered the cat to leave. The cat stayed
put. Danny doesn't, on principle, countenance opposition from his
natural inferiors (this, as I later found out, includes wives;
but that's a series of very long stories). He pointed and ordered
again. The cat, after the fashion of cats, sat still and looked
at him.

Danny, as someone once observed, never drops anything until
it's absolutely finished. He doesn't compromise with Error. He
probably wouldn't, for example, roll something out the door in
the hope that the cat would chase it, or go into the kitchen and
pick up the can opener. Having determined what should happen and
issued an order in accordance therewith, it would be weak and
possibly sinful to back off or change his tactics. If ever I saw
an irresistible force confronting an immovable object, it was
Danny giving orders to a cat. I laughed so hard I couldn't stand
up.

The cat won the first round. As Danny was scrambling under
the table in the undignified fashion of a human negotiating with
a cat, I managed to choke out, "Danny, I'm glad your cats obey
you!"

Danny ultimately won, of course. Humans win most encounters
with animals, at least in the short run, and a small animal in a
confined space is at a great disadvantage. The cat was hauled out
from under the table and deposited ignominiously outside, leaving
Danny triumphantly in possession of the space under his table --
albeit with some sacrifice of face and dignity. I was inclined to
give the moral victory to the cat.

NOTICE TO QUIT

Off and on for years, we have heard what sounded like
chirping and fluttering in the hose that vents the dryer. Once
we went so far as to look behind the dryer and, by shaking and
poking the hose, satisfy ourselves that at that time, at least,
no one was living there. This spring, however, the fluttering
and twittering were more pronounced than ever before. We had
many discussions entitled We Have to Do Something About the Birds
in the Dryer; but getting at the hose is nontrivial. We are
easily daunted by such projects.

The dryer is in the pantry, on a waist-high shelf. The hose
is vented out a window at nearly ceiling height. It is illegal
to vent a dryer out a window: the fire department thinks every
window should be available for egress in case of fire. This is
hysterically funny when applied to a condominium where all the
windows are blocked by potted plants, electronic equipment, a
seven-foot Steinway, and much other stuff, and particularly when
applied to the pantry window, which is a couple of feet high and
a foot wide and accessible only from that shelf.

The dryer, like all new-ish appliances, is huge -- much
bigger than we need. It's maybe three inches from the wall on one
side and five from the pantry shelves on the other, and that's a
generous estimate.

The interface between the hose and the window is one of my
famous jury-rigs. It works fine and even looks more coherent than
much of my handiwork, but it is next to impossible to remove or
work on it without taking it apart completely. When I put it
together, I didn't know that an unprotected dryer hose is prime
avian real estate.

This spring, after a month or so of declining performance,
the dryer substantially stopped drying. It got warm and tossed
stuff around, but the stuff didn't dry. There was nothing for it
but to relocate the boxes stacked from the top of the dryer to
the eight-foot ceiling, coax the dryer away from the wall, and
see what was going on.

We pulled and twisted the dryer forward and tipped it off
the shelf, resting it on the top of the step stool -- which
filled most of the pantry -- in what would have been a precarious
position if there had been any room for it to fall. I was able
to step onto the shelf and move gingerly around the dryer into a
position where I could reach the top of the window.

We found that we couldn't see even a glimmer of light
through the hose. There definitely had to be a nest in there.
Hoping there weren't any baby birds in the nursery, I amputated
the house several inches below the window and disconnected the
other end from the dryer. Several inches from the top was a neat
little nest, empty: no birds; not even any eggs. Greatly
relieved, I folded a piece of stout wire screening into a hollow
cube, crammed it into the entrance to the hose, and grafted a new
hose from there to the bottom of the dryer.

This all sounds straightforward enough; but it was rather
like building a ship in a bottle from inside the bottle, and then
trying to get out. Also, with the dryer and the step stool
effectively filling the pantry, we couldn't get at our main stash
of tools and were confined to the contents of a small tool box
that happened to be on the floor. Thus, for example, we had no
hammer and only a small pair of wire cutters.

Even before we finished, somebody came home, took one look,
and flew away. Before I finished connecting the hose to the
bottom of the dryer, the homeowner was back, first with a flutter
and an irate chirp, thereafter with clicks and scritches and
great persistence.

I didn't fasten the cube in place with a couple of skewers,
as I thought I might, because I didn't have any skewers, I didn't
like to make holes in the hose, and I was tired of the whole
project. There's no knowing how long it took the little beasties
to get the wire cube out. By the time the dryer failed again,
about a week later, they had done so, rebuilt the nest, and laid
a couple of eggs. We found out about the eggs when Laurie put
his thumb in one and the other fell on the floor.

We broke down and bought a plastic bird guard from the
hardware store. It would have been a whole lot easier to adapt
the bird guard to my venting system from outside the window; but
we live on the second floor and don't own a ladder. My husband
doesn't do ladders and gets the blue willies if I threaten to do
so. Fortunately, I have achieved sufficient maturity not to do it
anyway just to prove that he can't tell me what to do. I probably
wouldn't have driven my motorcycle to the maternity ward either,
but it was great fun to tell my first husband that I planned to.

I was absorbed in trying to incorporate the bird guard into
my original jury-rig, with much difficulty and ill temper, a
scratched knuckle, and a couple of broken fingernails, when the
phone rang: my son, offering to move a potted plant that I had
asked him about the day before. "Good," I said, "you can finish
sticking this thing in the dryer." The dryer had come up in the
previous day's conversation as well.

Justin finished the job, not exactly easily, but more expe-
ditiously than my husband and I were managing to do. With it all
together and the dryer back in place, Justin noticed the screen
to the bird guard lying around somewhere. I had wondered about
that -- It had fallen off while I was working with it, much too
easily, it seemed to me.

He pulled the dryer out from its position yet again -- for
the fourth time counting the prior week's event -- and wired the
screen back onto the bird guard with paper clips, one of his
favorite building materials (have I mentioned that jury-rigs run
in my family?). We offered him anything he wanted as a reward for
his efforts. He settled for a burrito from Anna's for himself and
another for Amanda.

If the birds have tried to get in again, their efforts
haven't been audible from inside the house. I regret their
frustration and disappointed expectations -- but we need the
dryer.

BURRITO-HUNTING

When my first husband and I lived in South San Francisco, our
road trips began with overstuffed burritos from El Gran Taco,
eaten en route. I nicknamed the restaurant El Dubious Taco
because the ambience wasn't welcoming, at least not to me: the
all-male clientele eyed me suspiciously, and the help knew barely
enough English to take an order. I had to explain to one of them
about California sales tax. But they made a dynamite burrito.

El Gran Taco's burritos were made with refried pinto beans. They
didn't use ground meat: a pork or beef burrito contained shreds
and pieces chopped from a chunk of stewed or pot-roasted meat.
I'd have given a good deal to know what they cooked the meat in,
and what was in the salsa and if you could buy it; but El Gran
Taco's staff and I didn't have nearly enough language in common
for culinary discussions.

In the spring of 1979, in the first months of pregnancy, I would
wake up early, feeling wonderful, and ride my motorcycle to an
8:00 AM class at San Francisco State University, where I was
studying music. As the morning and my back-to-back classes
advanced, the queasiness came on. By early afternoon, nauseated
and ferociously hungry, I often lunched on one of those huge pork
burritos with hot sauce, washed down with a beer. I sure did
enjoy those burritos. They were almost the only thing I missed
about California when we left in 1980.

At that time, no one on the East Coast seemed to have heard of
pork burritos, or beef burritos made from anything but hamburger.
But in the mid-1990s, a restaurant appeared in Davis Square,
Somerville, that produced the kind of pork burrito I was used to.
The restaurant didn't last, and was replaced by a day care
center.

Differently conceptualized burritos became available in the late
1990s. The Blue Shirt Cafe in Davis Square offered grilled
chicken and beef as well as vegetarian burritos, with black or
refried beans and many exciting variants (still no pork). I
patronized the Blue Shirt frequently when I worked in Davis
Square, trying not to spill too much burrito juice into my
keyboard. (Why are so many of my favorite restaurant sandwiches
-- Reubens and meatball subs come to mind -- the kind you take a
bath in?) The Purple Cactus on Massachusetts Avenue in North
Cambridge also used grilled beef and chicken and a choice of
beans. I indulged myself in at least as many as I could afford
until the day I walked in, suspecting nothing, and found the
former Cactus presided over by a young man preparing to sell
pasta; the Cactus had been sold. I was heartbroken, in a small
sort of way.

About the same time, a client of one of the other people in my
office building sent in Tex-Mex food from their restaurant,
Anna's Taqueria. I don't remember pork, but their burritos were
constructed on the same lines as those of El Gran Taco. Where, I
asked, is Anna's? Boston, or somewhere equally inaccessible.
Alas. I continued to patronize the Cactus and pin my hopes on a
promise of an eventual Anna's nearer to me.

Anna's Taqueria did appear in Davis Square, and then in Porter
Square. The beef and/or chicken burritos were just what I had in
mind, and eventually I found out that chili verde in this context
means pork. Anna's chili verde burrito with refried beans and extra
hot sauce matches my memory, imperfect by this time, I'm sure,
of the pork burritos from El Gran Taco.

When I ask a purveyor of burritos for extra hot sauce I'm not
always taken seriously. They probably think, What does this old
gringa know from hot sauce? and go easy. I won't soon forget the
young man at Anna's who grinned from ear to ear and made three
passes along my burrito with the hot sauce bottle. That was a
wonderful burrito, even though I had to mollify my stomach with
ice cream.

The trouble with Anna's is the logistics. The space is large and
echo-y, and there is usually music playing. The people behind
the counter speak English about the way their counterparts at El
Gran Taco did, through all that ambient noise. Between my
elderly hearing and always-poor ability to pick auditory
information out of background noise, Anna's and I have serious
communication problems. In addition, there's often a long-ish
wait, and once you get to the beginning of the line you have to
step lively, order quickly, not hold up the works. I don't think
well on my feet; I get confused and flustered and my auditory
discrimination worsens. Furthermore, I don't stand up easily for
more than a minute or so. Maybe Anna's isn't for old people.

I hunted up a recipe for chili verde on line and have success-
fully made burritos. I'll eventually figure out how to wrap them
so that they don't fall apart; so even if Anna's should fail me,
I have the final resource of making them myself.

But help with Anna's is at hand. Remember that 1979 pregnancy?
He also likes burritos, is good to his mother, and lives near
Porter Square. I wait in the car while he deals with Anna's.
Then we sit side by side, peeling back foil and working our way
through our burritos, me riding and him driving, much as his
father and I used to do.

A ROOM OF MY OWN

When my sister moved into the family house, which she and I
own and our mother lives in, we borrowed money for some repairs
and improvements. My share of the payment on the equity loan
came to a bit more than I was then paying UHaul to store my
books, so I commandeered a room for them in the house.

Redecorating that room was one of the improvements. By the
time I took possession, it had white, painted walls instead of
the ancient blue-flowered wallpaper with brown water stains from
the 1938 hurricane, and a reddish-brown neutral carpet instead of
deteriorating linoleum. It even had heat. My sister made me
some green and burgundy drapes. I adopted a white table lamp
that wasn't being used and bought it a burgundy shade.

Other than that, my approach to interior decoration was to
line the place with books. I covered all the available walls
with cinderblock and particleboard shelves and a few real
bookcases that I happened to own, and the bulk of my husband's
and my combined libraries moved in. A couple of years ago, I
replaced the 16-inch blocks in two of the units with 12-inch
blocks, significantly increasing the available shelf space.
There's one unit left with 16-inch blocks, but those may have to
stay: the holes in the blocks are perfect for pens and pencils,
Chap-Stick, dental floss, a nail clipper, and one or two other
small objects that I would have to find other homes for.

After the shelving upgrade, I achieved a long-cherished goal
of equipping my room with a recliner, by the clever expedient of
putting it on the charge card and promising myself that I would
figure out how to pay for it when the bill came. As Stark Munro
(one of Conan Doyle's other fictional doctors), trying to estab-
lish himself in practice, said of the gas bill due in a month or
so, "Any number of things may have happened by then."

The recliner rests in a corner within arm's reach of the
cinderblock pigeonholes. Also close by are a plant stand that
supports a mug of tea, a few books of poetry, and a box of
tissues; a small table comfortably littered with papers; a pile
of books on the floor that I plan to get back to soon; and a
wastebasket. What more could any rational creature want? Well,
yes, there's a bathroom at the end of the hall and a kitchen
downstairs. There's also a cordless phone when I remember to
bring it in from the front hall, half a mile away.

The back window looks over the field and the woods behind
the house. The window beside the recliner faces the house next
door, across the lawns and some trees. The view from the
recliner is mostly the second story of the barn, with sky and
treetops; but in the spring, I set morning glories in a large
planter directly under that window and provide them with strings
that lead to the top of the window. By the end of June I have
vines to look at, and flowers from July through September. Like
Charles Darwin, I admire climbing plants.

I wonder at odd moments what seven cinderblock-and-particle-
board shelves and the books on them weigh, what kind of shape the
hundred-year-old floor is in under the carpeting, and what might
be the first symptoms of an imminent, so to speak, breakthrough.
I especially think of this when reading in Little Dorrit or Bleak
House about the collapse of elderly houses in nineteenth-century
London. But as long as the ceiling under my library shows no
sign of cracking, I will continue to climb into my recliner and
tranquilly read myself crosseyed every weekend.

THE WELSH LULLABY

Choir rehearsal: we're taping the Welsh lullaby that most of
us know as All Through the Night, the arrangement that I got from
the Welsh choir that performed at the church earlier in the year.
The soprano part is just the melody, and I'm singing from memory.
I love this lullaby but have come to associate it with a particularly
dreadful moment in a custody war that ended about four years
before. If I'd lost I couldn't have listened to that song ever again;
but I won, if anyone can be said to win such a thing, so the
dreadful incident is almost a bittersweet memory, as I follow the
director, sing the tune, and get the words in the right places.

And there's the very child himself, walking around the periphery
of the room: I don't want to pay a sitter for a nine-year-old, or quite
want to leave him at home by himself. He's so cute, and a joy
generally. I watch him affectionately against the background of the
incident and the custody war, while continuing to follow the director,
sing the tune, and get the words in the right places.

Then the child's meanderings turn toward the front of the
room, where the long table with the tape recorder is. Some dippy
soprano has already spoiled one take by coming in late and
ruckling through the folders on the table. From the back of the
soprano section -- on risers, I think -- I watch with the helpless
horror known only to parents and pet owners as the boy,
whose approach to life has been characterized as "head first at a
hundred miles an hour," works his way toward the table -- watch,
and continue to follow the director, sing the tune, and get the
words in the right places.

The child is quick and observant, and knows about tape
recording. He notices the machine turning -- why do I picture
open reels? circa 1989, that's unlikely -- and pulls himself up
short in Michael Jackson's Moonwalk position, "Oops" in every
line of his expressive body (he has since become a dancer). To my
vast relief, he moonwalks himself backwards down the side of the
room and out the door. The side door leads to the sanctuary and
the parish hall downstairs. God knows what he'll find to do
there, but I can't help it. Probably nothing worse than
frightening someone by climbing pillars. I gratefully clear my
mind of everything but following the director, singing the tune,
and putting the words in the right places.

LEARNING TO DRIVE

At the astronomy club on a back road in Groton,
members set up their telescopes on the lawn at the side of the
building, in full view of any headlights coming up or down the road.
Accordingly, use of headlights is forbidden between the building
and the main road. Anyone who comes by with headlights blazing
into the astronomers' carefully cultivated night vision is persona
very non grata indeed.

Due to a flaw in the design of the universe, the most
exciting viewing of the heavens is to be had in January and
surrounding months. The astronomers come into the clubhouse and
thaw a bit now and then. For the benefit of non-astronomers and
of club members who have other things to do, the clubhouse has
light as well as heat, kept inside by heavy shades on the
windows.

My son and I usually arrived early enough in the day that
driving to the clubhouse wasn't an issue. He was the club
member. My interest in looking through lenses has always been
minimal. I relate to James Thurber's piece about trying to make
sense of what he was seeing in the microscope in biology class:
He diligently copies what he sees, only to be told by the
instructor that he had copied the reflection of his own eyeball.
The main difference is that I usually couldn't see even that
clearly. So I stayed inside in the light and warmth while Justin
looked through the telescopes.

Optimal viewing requires minimal or no moonlight. It could
be very dark when we left the clubhouse. Justin would literally
have to lead me from the edge of the porch to the car and hope I
didn't fall into any holes on the way. When it came to backing
the car out of its place in a couple of lines of vehicles, most
of which had come in after we did, it was obvious that at twelve
or so Justin was far more qualified to get us out of there than I
was.

He would back out of the area where people parked (I
wouldn't quite dignify it with the term "parking lot") and drive
us out to the main road. As time went on, he would turn onto the
main road, and just keep going. Routes 119 and 2A through Groton
and points east, at the unheard-of hours when an astronomy club
is in full swing, are pretty deserted. By the time we got back
to our urban base it almost no cars were in sight.

No one drives more carefully and inconspicuously than an
otherwise conscientious under-age kid with a deep desire not to
get himself and his mother in trouble. The only time we got
stopped on that route, I was at the wheel. By the time Justin
was fourteen, he was a better driver than I am.