Berry Greedy Pickers

 I can tell you that $41 worth of blueberries will just about break your arm. So we bring auxiliary containers  (plastic buckets) to dump the booty into so we can keep picking with our light little Easter baskets.

I wanted a shot of Liam walking his berries up to the garage to be counted.  But I had to stop in the middle of shooting. "Don't swing a full basket, Liam!"

"Okay!"

 

  And here goes Phoebe with hers.

 Not until I got this shot on the screen did I notice I'd captured a priceless moment in Liam's sweet life. Craack! Whump! Dump!


Classic! Look at his mouth, wide open. Ohhh! Dang!

Phoebe, of course, stopped to help him recover his fruit.

There was a little fellow at the cash register who was only too happy to ring us up. His mom had a terrible time keeping those fingers at bay. He wanted to punch all the keys at once, and he came at that little adding machine like a baby octopus. "I try! I try!" And she let him punch in our sale.

 Needless to say the Thomas the Tank Engine PJ's, worn all day long, endeared him to me forever. Not to mention his passionate desire to help his mom. I remembered Liam always punching keys on the credit card machine at the grocery store. He'd get so frustrated when nothing happened. His momma's a cash type.

 

 Too soon, it was time to turn for home. We could have picked until nightfall, but I was out of money. And truth to tell, I made a cobbler with the last of the frozen berries from June 2010 to make room for 2011 fruit in the freezer!  That's what happens when you have helpful kids (one of whom once wore his Thomas pajamas all day long, too)

and beautiful blueberries, with the greenywhite promise of more to come. Ahh, Summer. Could you just linger awhile longer, spread out your gifts through the long dull winter?

21st Century Hunter-Gatherers

 I believe I was a crazy good hunter-gatherer in another life. I love to pick things and I'm fast at it. My kids have inherited the gene, although they tend to look for the premium fruit rather than mass volumes of it. They pride themselves not on having the most berries, but the biggest and fattest.  I pick three times faster than they do, but their berries are Super Premium.

The blueberries at Rolling Ridge Berry Farm are more the size of grapes this year. 

 

And they are sooo beautiful. I love the ones with the heavy bloom, like these:

 

They remind me of the powdery sheen on a pigeon's feather. 

All around us the songs of Baltimore orioles, scarlet tanagers, robins, cedar waxwings and yellow-breasted chats rang out from the woods and blueberry rows. You won't see crop netting here, or hear cannons or nasty recordings of starling distress calls. The Winders grow enough for the birds and us.

 

View from the backmost berry row, where I like to pick and bird at the same time. It's alive with yellowthroats, white-eyed vireos, chats, robins and the like.

The habitat all around is rich and birdy to start with and then this farm sets a smorgasbird. You can imagine. Lots of parent birds bring their fledglings to the farm to fatten them up and get a break from the babies' incessant demands for food.

Phoebe and Liam noticed that the sweetest berries were most likely to have a couple pierced by the triangular pecks of birds. They know where the best ones are.

So seduced were we by the abundance and ease of picking that before we knew it we had FORTY-ONE BUCKS WORTH OF BLUEBERRIES. Yiiikes. Which would have been well over $100 worth in the grocery store, only not even a tenth as fresh and delicious. To those of you who are wondering what you do with that many blueberries, we gorge on them fresh and freeze what we can't eat. We give them to friends and family, make cobblers and throw blueberries into smoothies and yogurt and over cereal. We have a blueberry ball. I'm thankful for Rolling Ridge Berry Farm. A visit there is the perfect way to spend a summer afternoon with the kids.

LIttle Towns, Narrow Roads and Old Houses

People who visit us for the first time often comment that we live in the middle of nowhere. No, we don't, but you can see nowhere from here. And that's exactly how we like it. Every single day I thank my lucky stars that I get to live in the middle of nowhere.

Sometimes there's a day when the sky's intensity matches the land's, and somehow my Canon G-11 is able to capture the vivid blue of the sky and the shapes of the clouds without making the landforms too dark. This was such a day. A perfect summer day.  I was so happy that my photos were coming out as beautifully as the day was.

 As you can see, Bethel Twp Rd. 340 is not much more than a little driveway. That's how I like my roads. Doesn't this make you want to snoop around, see what's up there? Or more importantly, what's not up there? I've been doing that lately, taking country roads that have heretofore only been names or numbers to me. And I am never disappointed. Sometimes there's a sandhill crane or a fox or a bobcat waiting for me down these roads.

Lucky to live here, that's all.

The hamlet of Lebanon. There are several Lebanon, Ohios. This happens to be my Lebanon Ohio. It's probably the littlest one. That's how I like my towns, too.

 I think this old house is still being lived in, though I'm not sure. Maybe it's just storage. But it's untouched from how it would have looked fifty years ago. I like my old houses like that.

 It has a little shed friend. Oh how I would love to have a shed like this, a place to store the lawnchairs and bicycles. I've asked for one for my birthday. It will be a new one, but we will love it no less.

From the back porch of the old house, this is the view:

 Yucca and lilac: the two steadfast friends of little old buildings, keeping them company through the decades.

And across the road stands another shed, with a beautiful old water pump. Looking at it took me right back to the breathless anticipation of pumping my grandma Ruigh's creaky old pump, waiting and waiting for the rush of cool, iron-tinged water to come gushing into my tin cup. I didn't much like the taste of the water, but I loved that I could bring it up all by myself if I worked hard enough.

The sky was moody and blue, but our spirits were undampened. Speaking of breathless anticipation, all these vistas were ours on the way to Rolling Ridge Berry Farm, our favorite you-pick establishment of all time.

 

On the other side of this field lay Berry Valhalla.