BARBARA EHRENTREU
SUMMER MEMORIES
I remember picking blueberries as a girl at the house in Monroe. The blueberries grew wild, and we rushed into the woods to pick them - our baskets holding those juicy blueberries piled high. I picked the biggest, bluest ones. Then I stuffed them into my mouth, the blueberry juice staining my lips. The leftovers I brought to my mother and aunts, who transformed them into pies.
Blueberry picking season, the bushes filled with juicy berries, came every summer. They grew wild everywhere in upstate New York. Even in later years, when I went to summer camp, I found them.. I loved finding blueberries, the joy of picking the fruit, choosing the best and knowing I was the first one there.
Now farmers grow blueberry bushes and pick them for us. I have to buy
containers of them. Now I can't run through the woods in my summer shorts, the bushes scraping my bare knees, the smell of the crushed leaves under my feet, the cool of the forest on my sun-soaked skin, and the exquisite taste of the blueberry juice, making my young body sticky and eager to be swimming in our nearby lake to clean myself after the job.
Blueberry picking was something anyone could do. Just pull off the berries, pop 'em into your mouth, taste the juice as it burst out of the fruit, a sensation of sweet, yet slightly sour urging me to find more. The big blue ones were always the best - sweet all the way through.
But I liked them cooked in a pie. They changed color and became purple in what we called huckleberry pie. The older people called the blueberries huckleberries. I got confused. Were blueberries huckleberries? When did they stop being blueberries and become huckleberries? I still don't know.
The house we lived in those summers is probably gone now. It was made of green shingles. I remember the winding, hilly, dirt road to the top, the screened-in porch, and our small rooms. Everyone ate together at a long table on that porch. There was usually corn on the cob. We would slather it in butter and gobble it tasting its sweet, green grass flavor. In addition, there were home-baked loaves of bread, roasted chicken and mashed potatoes .
At the end of each meal we'd have dessert - those pies we had seen cooling all day. Our mouths were eager for a taste of the berries in that heavenly crust. On rare evenings, when enough men were there to churn it, usually on weekends, we had homemade ice cream - usually peach or vanilla. Then the soft, creamy ice cream would blend with the pie in a taste I have never had again.
After dinner the children showered in an outdoor stall, girls, then boys. Toweled dry and in our pajamas we felt at peace.
Those Monroe summer days and nights are gone now. They were nights when the grown-ups sat outside in Adirondack chairs smoking and talking of aimless subjects. My cousins and I were allowed out until it got dark. We would chase the fireflies and catch a few. It tickled when they lit up in your hand. Then it was bedtime. We fell asleep to the droning of adult voices and the sounds of crickets and frogs. Sleep was easy then.
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