Where the Green Grass Grows 02

My sister was wearing a pair of pink and white slacks, a short-sleeved white blouse and a blue bandana tied over her dark, curly hair.Everywhere I looked, the bushes were covered with blueberries as big around as the end of my finger. Loretta and Dad each carried five-quart plastic ice cream pails, but Dad had given me a container he had made from a one-pound coffee can. The little berry pail had a wire handle, and it was the same kind of pail we used for picking blackberries. When I picked blackberries, I tied the pail to my belt loops so I could use both hands.A cool breeze out of the north fanned my face and arms as I sat down on the ground by the first clump of bushes. I could never sit down while I picked blackberries because the brambles were too prickly. But here I could reach right around me until I ran out of berries.I had already covered the bottom of the pail when Dad spoke up."Where's the kiddo?" he said."Here I am!" I said, popping up from my spot in the blueberry bushes.Dad laughed. "Sittin' down on the job, are ya? Getting any blueberries? Or are you eating them all?""No," I said, tipping my can toward him. "I'm not eating any. See?"I had, in fact, eaten some when I first started. The blueberries smelled so good, and were such a deep, delicious blue, I could not resist.

Fresh blueberries, I discovered, tasted as good as fresh blackberries. Before I sat down again, I paused to look around. The ring of dark green pine trees stood out against a sky that was now decorated with puffy white clouds. The wind sighing through the pine boughs and birds twittering from the treetops were the only sounds I could hear. No cars. No machinery. No barking dogs. Nothing at all to spoil the afternoon.Well, nothing except for one little black insect crawling on my leg below the hem of my shorts. About the size of an ant, the bug did not look like an ant. It was more round than that, and it had different kinds of legs. I tried to brush the insect off, but it would not brush off, so I picked it off with my fingernails. I tried to let go of the bug, but I could not because the pesky thing kept crawling along my fingers. I finally got rid of it by wiping my hand on the ground. I was going to start picking blueberries again, but even though I knew the insect was gone, I could not get over the idea that it was not gone. I kept remembering the way it had felt when it crawled on my bare leg.Every couple of minutes I stopped picking blueberries to check for another insect like the first one. But after a while when I did not find any more, I forgot about it and concentrated on filling my pail.

Bit by bit, the blueberries piled up in the little one-pound coffee can, covering the first ring and then the second. Filling the whole can seemed like a big job, but filling the can up to one ring and then the next did not seem like much work at all. A couple of times during the afternoon, I went to the car to drink some lemonade and to talk to Mom, who said she was having fun watching the clouds make different shapes. "It's been a long time since I've sat outside and watched clouds," she said.The sun was still high in the sky when Dad announced that we should start for home so we would arrive in time to feed the cows and do the evening milking.On the way home, once again I sat in the back seat with my big sister, and as we drove through evergreen forests and marshes with tall, green grass, it seemed to me that the whole day had been perfect. The sun had been warm but not too hot, and a breeze had cooled my face when I turned into the wind. But best of all, we had picked four five-quart pails of blueberries and half of another pail. Plenty of blueberries for my cereal and for dishes of blueberries with cream and sugar--and for Loretta to make blueberry pie--and for Mom to freeze blueberries so we could have pie during the winter.It wasn't until a few days later that I began to wonder if the trip up north really had been quite so perfect.