Blueberry Hill

Mia's China adoptee play group has a play date every week. We don't get to many of them - they are held on weekday mornings when Mia is usually at preschool or camp. This week we joined the group for a trip to a blueberry farm, followed by a picnic. Like many of these events, this one was 30 miles away. The drive took us through a rural-turning-suburban-sprawl area. The roads were narrow with lots of twists and turns. I had printed directions from Mapquest, and I had my Garmin GPS system as well. As usual, Mapquest and Garmin didn't agree, so I decided to go with Mapquest. (As it turned out, the Garmin was right this time.)
Oh, and did I mentioned that we were supposed to meet the group when the blueberry patch opened at 8 a.m. sharp? That meant I had to get up before 6 a.m., Mia at 6:30. Mia had been up until 11:15 the night before (her idea, not mine), which made the wake-up call particularly difficult. To tell the truth, I had little hope of waking Mia up, so I packed up her clothes, sunscreen, bug spray, etc. and strapped her in her car seat in her pajamas, with a Nutri-Grain bar and sippy cup of milk for breakfast.
We left the house at 7 a.m., and by 8 a.m. I was getting pretty frustrated by the obvious inaccuracy of the Mapquest directions. The Garmin was proposing that we circle back to an area we'd already passed, and I was pretty sure that wasn't right, either. Mia (who incidentally didn't sleep as I'd predicted) was loudly protesting that she wanted to get out of the car, and I felt the same. As I thought to myself, "I'm never again going on one of these junkets out here in the hinterlands," I decided to pump up my enthusiasm. "Mia, we're going to pick blueberries. Doesn't that sound like fun?"
To which Mia replied with delight, "Costco!!!!"
That is when I realized how little exposure Mia has to farms and vegetable gardens and berry patches. In my childhood, we lived within 4-5 miles of cornfields, grew tomatoes and radishes in the backyard, and picked wild berries when we visited my grandparents in northern Wisconsin. I vividly remember the times my grandparents took us with them to buy milk at a nearby dairy farm. (So vividly that I still practically gag when I recall the odor. My grandparents finally stopped taking me there, because I honestly couldn't help gagging and that embarrassed them in front of their dairy-farmer neighbors. When I discussed this once with my brother-in-law who is from a farming town in Minnesota, he said his parents always told him to think of that horrific odor as "The smell of money." That didn't help him, either.) Poor Mia, the only food she sees in the ground is the pots of basil, rosemary, and mint I grow on the deck.
With renewed determination, I stopped at a gas station, the first one I'd seen in 10 miles. The cashier helped me find the berry patch. (Garmin was right, I had to circle back.) By the time we arrived at 8:30, there was a long line of SUV's parked on the roadside, and the easy-to-reach branches of the blueberry bushes were already pretty bare. That meant we had to reach above shoulder height to get any berries. There were a few left on the very lowest branches, but Mia didn't have much interest in picking. She loved eating berries straight out of my pail, almost as fast as I could pick them. With my little blueberry-monster at my side, it took me about 45 minutes to accumulate 1 quart of blueberries. As we checked out and paid our $2.50 for the quart, the owner assured me we didn't have to pay for what she'd eaten. (I'm sure he would have been shocked to know how many blueberries the little blueberry-monster had consumed.) Mia tugged at my arm, wanting to go through the rusty barbed-wire fence to explore the owner's private vegetable garden. I felt satisfied that I am teaching my child that produce comes from farms, not from the walk-in cooler at Costco.