One of my former coworkers (and a pal), Michael Creedon, came over to my office one day about 20 years ago and asked me something about a word processing file he was working on. Michael wasn't the most savvy computer user and he kept asking me whether he should "put it in the blue" in his jolly Irish accent. I had no idea what he was talking about so I went over to his desk and figured out that "to put it in the blue" meant to highlight something. That phrase has been in common parlance for Sam and me ever since. And it's an apt phrase the past week or so now, because we got put in the blue big-time. We found out that our favorite nearby nature preserve, Beech Hill, allowed people to sign up for time slots to pick wild blueberries for free! So we spent nearly two hours picking berries last week. Aside from strawberries, wild blueberries are perhaps the lowest of low hanging fruit (jeez, I hate that phrase) but despite their lowness, they yield slowly (ergo, that cliche should be retired as it is just plain wrong). Persistence paid off and we brought home 6 quarts and probably each consumed about a quart during our hard fieldwork. Wild berries are more concentrated or jammy in blueberry flavor than the high bush (domesticated) type. And apparently there were about 30 varieties in the field so there were all sorts of subtle nuances--sweeter, more floral, spicy--for some of the berries. Sam used some of that haul and some rhubarb growing behind our rental house to make me a blue-barb pie for my birthday today. Delicious! Summer in Maine has its pleasures. Lobster is, of course, another one, and we finally found a low cost source. And you get some Maine true grit along with the lobster for free... terse, shirtless guys smoking cigarettes, cracking wise, and using pulleys to hoist lobster bait (i.e., frozen tails of fish) from shore to the boat while one of them goes to get the lobsters. Though I couldn't tell from their attitude if an actual transaction was taking place or not, until the guy brought them to me.
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Our blueberry haul
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Sam harvests blueberries; this field is full of them even if it doesn't look like it
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Filling up one of our containers
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| More blueberry picking |
