Blueberries

Molly ate blueberries for the first time yesterday. . .blueberries and peas. A special little girl we love can't eat blueberries yet, so we ate peas too (which she can eat) in her honor!! Molly adored those berries. Not surprisingly, she was covered with purple stains around her mouth causing her to appear to have a five o'clock shadow. No, I didn't get a picture of that-I know, I missed a good one. A picture did jump into my head though as Molly downed blueberry after blueberry.

Front and center in my mind's eye was a picture of an adventure Cole and Meg and I undertook as a result of reading a wonderful book entitled Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey. The American Library Association describes this book as the story of "what happens on a summer day in Maine when a little girl and a bear cub, wandering away from their blueberry-picking mothers, each mistake the other's mother for its own." We thought the story and the pictures so delightful that we were inspired to go blueberry picking too. We lived in NC at the time and Mr. Frank and Mrs. Sadie invited us to come to their home and help ourselves to their blueberry bushes. We even purchased a galvanized bucket in which to put our produce so that our berries would make the same sound as Sal's did in her bucket kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk! What fun we had that evening. Mrs. Sadie even served us homemade peach ice cream after we finished our berry picking.

Sadly, that precious book has been sitting forgotten on the children's bookshelf for more than a few years. I searched for and found this treasure tonight and have plans to revisit our blueberry adventures of years gone by very very soon with Cole and Meg and two new adventurers--kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk!