Blueberry Bushes

My grandparents' house, where my grandmother still lives, is two miles up the street from my parents' house, where I grew up. Although I have often written, here and elsewhere, about their swimming pool and its powerful presence in my childhood, it occurred to me today that I'd never written about the blueberries.

On my grandparents expansive front lawn, my grandfather, who like my grandmother loved to plant and grow things, planted a semi-circle of blueberry bushes: five of them, if I am remembering correctly. Possibly six. I don't have a particular or profound memory of these bushes, but they are very evocative to me nonetheless, as I suspect they would be to my sister and cousins, probably my grandmother too.

It's funny: I can remember vividly which bush was where, although the bushes have been uprooted or left to wither over the past decade or so. Each had its own character, its own pros and cons and preferred style for picking. The first one, closest to the house, was small but bore well for its size; the berries got blue fast and grew in clusters. The second bush was perhaps the most lush. Always thick with berries, it was the most sought after if more than one person was harvesting. I remember arguments about who was "hogging it." The third was under the radar, relatively sparse, as was the fourth. The fifth was a different variety, wild I think. The berries were noticably smaller, sweet but harder to accumulate en masse.

For the period in summer that these bushes bore fruit, we picked regularly, individually and together. We made muffins, mostly, with the berries. My mother had acquired the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffin recipe, and it will forever be the iconographic muffin for me: thick with berries, best eaten warm, incomplete without a crackly top of sugar.

When I think about the blueberry bushes, though, it is not just the bushes themselves, the berries, that come to mind. They are a conduit to so many other childhood memories, images: making paper on the stone patio outside my grandparents' sun porch, playing whiffle ball in the yard and using one of the bushes as second base, my sister and two of my cousins playing with stuffed bears at the foot of one after my grandfather's funeral, as people circulated among these bushes in strangely formal clothing for a hot morning in early July by a swimming pool, the black dress with little flowers and a white lace collar that I wore that day myself, the most grown-up I'd ever owned, shopping for that dress with my aunt, feeling immensely relieved when later that day a friend and I were allowed to go in for a swim.

I love the way this happens, the way making myself think of something seemingly ordinary opens a door, which opens another door, and suddenly I am ten again, holding one of my grandmother's water glasses, half full with sun-warmed fruit, barefoot in the dewy grass, nothing to do but pick berries.