Thanksgiving in July

In the two years I spent living in Japan, I felt homesick only twice. Once while sitting at my desk on a rainy Thanksgiving morning, feeling conspicuously absent from the steamy bustle of my mother’s kitchen. And once upon finding a tiny plastic crate of blueberries in a rural Japanese supermarket.

The box held a mere handful of the round blue fruit, and was sold for an outrageous price. But the label -- a blue sticker bearing the familiar squiggly silhouette of my home state -- told me that these berries had grown in Oregon soil, and had made the long trip to this unlikely place, just as I had.

That little handful of displaced blueberries seems especially poignant today, given that thirteen pounds of their cousins have recently taken up residence in my freezer. It’s National Blueberry Month in America, and one of the great delights of life in this valley of ours is that all summer long, you’re never far from a treasure trove of fruit. That fact almost makes up for the deadly early-summer pollen count around here. Almost.

On Saturday morning, my boyfriend and I decided to score a bit of that fruitful bounty for ourselves. We drove out into farmland, following a road that narrowed, became increasingly windy, turned to gravel, and eventually deadended in a field where a few cows stood next to a sign reading, “U-Pick Blueberries, $1.25 a pound.”

A girl in a blue plaid dress handed us yellow plastic buckets and led us into the blueberry patch. “You can start on these two rows,” she said, indicating a swath of six-foot-high bushes. Jeff and I looked at the thicket of branches she was indicating, then at each other. Start? The berries were so plentiful here that we wouldn’t need to travel more than a few feet to pick more than our buckets would hold.

As fruit harvests go, picking blueberries is as pleasant an experience as one could wish for. There aren’t any thorny canes to contend with, no stooping to gather berries from the ground, no ladders to climb. Ripe berries were absurdly plentiful, and sifting through the shiny green leaves to reveal occasional caches of extra-large gems kept the task from becoming monotonous. But most importantly, as “U-Pickers”, we could quit whenever the sun got too high or we had enough berries to fill up our freezers.

Even this mild harvesting task, though, made me think harder than usual about the places where our food comes from, and the people and work involved in making it appear at our local farmer’s market, let alone supermarkets half a world away. As we stare down the barrel of this endless election season, in which we’re all shouting at each other about immigrant populations and the price of gas and economic recession, spending a quiet summer morning gathering your own food brings a new perspective to the whole endeavor.

Legend has it that the Native Americans and the Pilgrims might have eaten blueberries together at the first Thanksgiving. November’s a long way off, though, so as we wait for pumpkin pie and election results, I’ll give some thanks a little preemptively. I’m grateful for that North American native, the blueberry, and I’m grateful to live in a place where they can be picked beneath a clear blue sky while hawks circle overhead. I’m grateful for a new berry-stained viewpoint on the complexities of this society of ours. And I’m especially grateful that a few hours’ work means that I’ll remember all this when I’m eating July-sweet blueberry pancakes on cold winter mornings, when summer feels as far away as Japan.

(Originally published 7/28/08 in the Oregon Daily Emerald.)