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SMALL THINGS...
are so easily dismissed. We tell ourselves they're unimportant, insignificant, ephemeral.
Yet every year, in the building heat of June and July, the blueberry arrives in my life. It is all at once the presence of my childhood, my mother's spirit, and the immediacy of joy, flavor, and beauty that transcend time.
Recently, we were in conversation with a dear friend who wondered if her children's food memories would be as poignant and meaningful as her own, when she was often too taxed to make something from scratch. I thought immediately of lying on my stomach, reading my brother's Calvin and Hobbes compendiums, and deriving a bottomless, unnameable comfort from Bill Watterson's depiction of a child coming in from playing in the snow to eat peanut butter crackers and hot chocolate. It occurred to me that children don't have judgment about the food that delights them in the present, and adults rarely have it about food memories from the past. The sharpness of what we notice - its pure, physical satisfaction - lasts in us, infused with the mystery of why it mattered enough to stay - a question we may never fully understand, except that our noticing it made it somehow divine.
In his stirring, transformative book, Die Wise, Stephen Jenkinson writes about what I suspect is the origin of this feeling: “In cultures where food is not plentiful it is precious. Even food prepared poorly or without spice, for example, could be good food. A small meal in a bowl carries the immense story of its growing or hunting, the whole sweeping saga of how the seed or the animal came to the people, all the times that the same food has been eaten in the same way as now, joining those at the frugal feast with all those who did so before.”
The blueberry is a frugal feast, yet it connects me to the living and the dead as it returns each summer, carrying the invisible meaning of the past in a package I can see, touch, taste, and fill my belly with in the present. The blueberry is of the body - it is real in the physical sense, containing its own seeds - and also of spirit - it contains memory and rekindles delight in the present like an eternal flame. Blueberries are not precious or hard to find in this part of the world, yet their presence is divine. They are abundant and meaningful, common and holy.
In a letter to her cousins, Emily Dickinson wrote, "Genius is the ignition of affection - not intellect, as is supposed - the exaltation of devotion, and in proportion to our capacity for that, is our experience of genius.”
The humble blueberry is a genius to me. It ignites my affection, shows me my capacity to exalt in devotion to what is "real" in my hands and what is "real" in my mind and heart. The blueberry makes me humble in the face of its divinity. It makes me want to honor the incredible truth of its growing from something tiny into not much more than a glint of color that stands out, a daub of velvety blue pastel in an expanse of green that fits in my palm, rings in my ear with the subtle resistance of its skin as I crunch it in my molars.
Why does the blueberry matter? In childhood, we live in the present, slowly awakening to the expanse of the future before us, and the collection of memories that have, without effort or awareness, compiled from the past. As an adult, I have to work at being present. The past and future are tempting distractions. In particular, the future, as time has become a commodity that I think I can outsmart, if I spend enough energy planning and preparing for 'what's next.' The blueberry startles me into the present.
As humans come and go in our lives, their absence may be something we carry with us, or a reminder of how we change as we grow. The blueberry makes me wonder, what things do we love that don't go away? What are the things we can experience when we are in community and when we're alone? And when we pay attention to those things, where do they lead us in the world and in the ways we interact with others?
In another letter, Dickinson wrote, "The career of flowers differs from ours only in inaudibleness." If flowers can be said to have a career, what can we learn about our own careers from flowers? What things are inaudible to us, that we want to pay attention to anyway? If we listen closely, can they show us how important small things are?
This ode would not be complete without a few recipes, new, old, and not yet tried:
/ Marisa Renee Lee recommends Aran Goyoaga's Blueberry Breakfast Cake.
/ Alison Roman's Blueberry Cornmeal Tart is a new favorite.
/ Blueberry Hill Cupcakes have been a staple between our pantries for almost two decades.
/ For Blueberry Pie, I always use Marion Cunningham's Fannie Farmer Cookbook.
To the importance of blueberries,
Dor + Tay
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