A Handful of Stars by Cynthia Lord

Author:Cynthia Lord
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2015-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

At the beginning of summer it always feels like there’s so much time ahead: whole empty calendar pages of sunshine, warm sea breezes, midnight thunderstorms, and running barefoot in the grass. Enough afternoons to do every single thing you wanted to do and even some days left over to do nothing at all.

But somehow summer fills up and flies by. Instead of feeling hopeful and free and happy as August wore on, I couldn’t help feeling sad pangs that when the blueberry festival was over and summer went away, Salma would go with it.

Every chance we had, Salma and I painted bee houses. As we worked, and customers came and went from the coffee station, I quizzed her on blueberry facts.

“Okay, here’s another one,” I said. “Why do we still employ blueberry rakers? Why isn’t the whole industry mechanized?”

“One reason is rocks,” Salma said, painting tiny sea lavender flowers on her bee house. “The land is rocky, and it costs a lot of money to move boulders. People with rakes can get into places that a machine can’t.”

“Right.” I skimmed through the Maine Wild Blueberries brochure Salma had picked up at the Winthrop office. “When is the wild blueberry season in Maine?”

“I’d know that one without even studying,” Salma said. “Late July to early September.”

“And then where will you go?” I asked.

She looked up from the flowers she was painting. “Maybe Pennsylvania for apple season. I hope so, anyway. The school I go to in Pennsylvania has the best art teacher. Mrs. Danbury is one of my star friends. She almost makes up for fractions.”

“Fractions? What do you mean?”

“My Pennsylvania school is behind my Florida school in math,” she said. “Not by a lot, but they hadn’t done adding and subtracting fractions when I left Pennsylvania in fourth grade, and my class in Florida was past that when I came. So I missed it and I always get adding and subtracting fraction questions wrong when you have to change the bottom numbers. I hate when people think I’m not smart or they make fun of me just because I don’t know something they know.”

“I don’t like that, either. Does either school have after-school help?” I asked. “I had to do that with decimals. I hate the decimal point! Hard to believe something so little can cause so many problems!”

Salma shrugged. “It’s too hard to stay after school because I don’t have someone who can come pick me up at the right time. Give me another blueberry question.”

I looked back at the brochure. “Maine harvests what percentage of lowbush wild blueberries in the USA?”

“Ninety-eight percent,” Salma said.

“That’s right! What’s the Maine state dessert?”

“Blueberry pie,” Salma said.

“Well, there was a push a few years back by the whoopie-pie people,” a voice said, startling us both.

I hadn’t paid any attention to Marty Johnson fixing his coffee next to us. I certainly didn’t know he’d been listening.

“But the blueberry pie people won,” Marty said. “How are blueberry bushes pruned?”

Salma smiled at him. “By mowing or burning.

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