LOW-HANGING CHARITY
Love In The Time Of Blueberries
There is no greater glory than to cry for love
In the 1980s, my grandfather ran blueberry-raking crews in Maine, and I was on the crews, a boy-shaped cork adrift on waves of blue romance.
Minus the romance.
In the first twenty minutes of berry work, you sweat out and steam out every last drop of the romance.
The berries we picked were “lowbush,” meaning sadistically low. To reach them, you had to take your body, that beautiful vertical line, and bend it into a question mark, which is against God’s will.
And “picked” is the wrong word. You don’t pick blueberries, you rake them into buckets with a blueberry rake: a handheld contrivance with nine-inch tines on the bottom and a handle on top.
So, you’re out there breaking the back and sweating the sweat, filling up bucket after bucket while the sun’s raw light fills the meat bucket that is your body, fermenting there into a hardy vintage of melanoma.
I was five years old when I got into the business. The sun’s thumb mashed the top of my…
