Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Blueberries


blueberries
Originally uploaded by katzeye

I think I love blueberries as much as I love life. I love my failing eyesight, too. It makes it possible for me to see the blueberries in the sunny morning and capture them in the image above. And blueberries are good for my eyes. It’s a good thing I love blueberries.

When I go to restock the pantry, I always check to see if there are any fresh blueberries in stock. They are almost always not in season, and so, once again, I get a bag of frozen ones.

I was doing just that when I approached the frozen section recently at my local Spouts. I should add that I am not one of those people who loves to go grocery shopping. I enter the store, and it is as if from the moment I enter, I am lost in some kind of wicked maze and my job is to find my way out again with an adequate amount of groceries to keep us going for another week.

My plan, this time, was to get the really big bag of blueberries, hoping they might last for a while. I went straight to the frozen fruit and found an apparently frozen woman, just standing there, her chin in her hand, sighing and staring at the bags of frozen blueberries.

I had to kind of contort to look around her and when she noticed me, she sighed, without moving at all, “I know, the other ones were a better deal.”

I gave her a polite smile, not really comprehending her plight, and wanting to just get my blueberries before the crumbs I left to lead me back to the exit were gone. It was then that I noticed she had a grocery flyer crumpled in her slightly blue fist. She never did move, and I reached around her and grabbed the huge bag, and I thought that I saw her eyes dart about nervously as I did so.

I then made my way along the rest of the frozen foods, and back to the deli for the cheese I forgot, and back to the cereal aisle for whatever else it was I forgot, and then I got stuck in the toothpaste aisle for some reason. Maybe there was something shiny there.

I think my blueberries were starting to thaw as I made it to the check-out line.

I was behind about four other people, so, I occupied my time observing their purchases. Vegetables I had never seen before in my life, and some kind of animal body part, and a jar of green sauce. I resisted going back to the sauce aisle to examine the green sauce more closely. Green spaghetti sauce? Well, maybe a pesto sauce but in a giant glass jar? That could be interesting.

Oh, my turn. As I was uploading my groceries there was a clerk on a telephone of some kind, standing inside my checker’s space. He was trying to get someone to find some of the blueberries that the frozen blueberry lady was looking for. I heard him say, “Yeah, she is still there, in the frozen aisle.”
Probably pretty much a blueberry, herself, by then. She had a coupon for a particular bag of blueberries and none of the others would do, and she would wait.

I walked out into the sunshine and thought about the blueberry lady. I love blueberries. I really do. But I love life even more. I think we sometimes get stuck in the frozen food aisle or whatever other aisle in our lives that seems to be of most import at a particular time and we miss out on something else. Like walking out into the sunshine, the grocery chore done until next week, and ready to do something else like talk to a little kid, smell the ocean, write a letter to a friend, soak in the gratitude of a beautiful day.