When I close my eyes and think of a food I’d most like to taste, it’s a very specific one – a blueberry plucked from the bushes in Northern Michigan, in July. For more than 30 years, I’ve been going every summer to a family cabin on the shores of Lake Michigan. Some years we get there a bit too early for the season, but late July is peak blueberry time.
The feeling is much about the juicy, sun-warmed burst of a berry. But it’s also about the multi-generational family time – my husband, our kids, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles who have gathered that week choose a blueberry day. The goal of the entire day is to pick blueberries, and then make pies, or cobbler, or sometimes muffins. Always pie, sometimes with a pie contest. We drive out from the cabin on some windy, wooded roads about five miles away, and usually find we’ll have the blueberry patch all to ourselves. There’s an honor system pay what you want box, some bags and containers, and rows and rows of blueberry bushes covered in fruit. We scatter to collect and snack along the way.
Groupings form of cousins, mothers and daughters. Personalities emerge – some are diligent to pick only the plumpest, bluest berries, others say, is it time to go back and make the pie? While some compete for the most berries collected, there’s always someone who is just chilling and catching blueberries in their mouth in the air. We weigh our bags on a little scale, put cash in the box, and head back with bags full of berries. It is a day that – especially with busy lives and schedules – is so slow it almost seems like it’s from a different time.
My kids, now young adults, don’t ever remember a summer without blueberries. On a recent trip home one of them said to me, "Remember when Nana (my mom, who died a few years ago) would always put blueberries on our cereal when we were little?" I did, and she always would for me when I was a child, though I had never connected my love for blueberries with that memory before. Our show this week, "Tasting the Past," is all about how our food memories bring us back to a particular place or time, or person. Or maybe all three. We’d love to hear about your food memories – email me at listen@ttbook.org.
—Shannon