Blueberries (not Gooseberries)

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Preparing breakfast yesterday morning I filled my arms with various jars, large containers or left-overs, and an immense section of watermelon from the refrigerator so that I could get at the yogurt lodged in the way back of the top shelf. In the process I toppled a box of blueberries onto the kitchen floor.

Ever do that?

The fruit package top popped and berries went everywhere. Newly ripe blueberries (especially cold ones) have a plump roundness - almost circular, ball-like, and possess a surprrising ability to get everywhere on an open kitchen floor surface kept clean of clutter and dust as the care-takers in our home insist be the case with ours.

Sweeping up hundreds of the berries introduced me to places I never knew existed in our kitchen.

I began sweeping, feeling like the effort was a boring chore and completed the work choosing to believe I was a Sweep Detective. Yup - Sweep Detective Bob. I investigated the whole of the kitchen - beneath appliances, in corners never seen - around baseboards that took on a curve and sweep that were nothing but artistic in their smart design and construction - and closets and doors built too far from the ground to block the round little lovelies I'd let loose.

The experience reminded me of early swimming lessons (getting thrown into the water -- Now Swim!), or better, early trash removal and disposal chores when I was a kid, which included cleaning the cat's litter pan in the days before commercial litter existed, dusting hard to reach furniture surfaces --- I was told then to "just get it done!"  Fortunately, my partner was instructed in such cases to "Make a game of it," and she passed this on to me.  I made a game of it.

Oh, instruction to refrigerator manufacturers of the 21st century: consider providing flexible guards along the base of your product that repel - with a slight flipping action - tiny objects that look to lodge themselves in the darkness at the base of your products.

Still, love blueberries.