Blueberry Fields Forever

I've been on vacation all week. I suppose it's possible to have a vacation even when you don't go anywhere and it rains every day, but the past week has not provided much good evidence for the idea. We did have a very nice hour picking blueberries on someone's property off of Long Hill Road in Gray on Friday, during a break among the downpours, drizzles, and just plain rainy spells.

There is something about the smell of a blueberry patch. It doesn't matter where it is. In this case, it was on an otherwise lovely low hilltop studded with one large cell phone tower and several plunked ranch houses surrounded by predictable rural home detritus - think rusty rowing machine circa 1989. Several pickups sporting Yosemite Sam mudflaps and "peeing Calvin" window stickers added to the atmosphere. My snarky comments are probably extra unfair given the fact that we picked three full quarts of berries and the guy charged us all of four dollars - a dollar a pound. That's about 20% of the farm stand price.

Where I was: It doesn't matter where it is, the smell of a blueberry patch always recalls a pristine lake's pine- and granite-studded point or island from your youth. Mine, anyway. I can think of several of these specifically. One such island of relatively recent memory is on Donnell Pond in Hancock County.

Cold fruit is nice, but there is nothing like a fistful of blueberries still warm from the rays in which they were basking before you plucked them. Much more flavor. Much more emblematic of those two resources so scarce in Maine: Sun and Heat. On this occasion we encountered a nice example of promiscuous cultivation, in which dewberries were intermixed with the blueberries. Double the pleasure!