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Tuesday Slice of Life : July 5, 2016.

In the early morning hours of the Fourth of July, I put on my berry-picking grubbies and headed into my friend’s enormous blueberry patch.

The air was heavy with cool dampness. Birds were twittering their morning songs. A rooster crowed, and hens clucked noisily on the other side of a hedgerow. A screen door slammed and a dog barked his good morning to the world. Voices drifted on a breeze, and I shivered and moved to a bush in the sunshine. Its branches were heavy with fruit, bent to the point of breaking as they touched the ground. With my hand under a cluster, I gently rolled my thumb. Sometimes I rolled a cluster into both hands simultaneously. The kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk* of berries in my stainless steel pan on the ground echoed loudly in the country stillness, and I pondered the wonder of harvest time, God’s time of provision.

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Less than two hours later, I headed home with several large stainless steel bowls brimming. Before I began the holiday festivities, I picked over the berries, removing stray stems or leaves and a spider or two. I set aside one gigantic bowl for finger-eating. The rest I will spread on trays to individually quick freeze before putting them into zip-locking bags for the freezer.

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There will be a day–a wintry day that today seems so far away, a cold rainy northwest day that always follows summer. And on that day, I will long for the sunshine of summer. On that day, I will reach into my freezer, pull out a bag of my frozen berries, and pop a few into my mouth as I bake a pie.

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I will sit down in my toasty kitchen with a slice of blueberry pie and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. And as I relish the taste of blueberry, I will be taken back to a summer morning — a morning filled with bird songs, lingering night coolness, golden rays of the sun creeping over the horizon, and a patch of bushes laden with an abundance of fruit.

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And I will be reminded that my Heavenly Father provides in abundance.

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*kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk  from Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McClosky


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