Fig Pudding by Ralph Fletcher

Fig Pudding by Ralph Fletcher

Author:Ralph Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins


5.

Traded Away

Late that summer, Cyn started acting funny. I first noticed it when Grandma Annie came for her summer visit. Grandma arrived with a box of chocolates for Mom and little presents for each of us kids, but mostly she arrived with blueberries on her mind. First chance she got she loaded up the car with a picnic lunch to go pick blueberries in Plymouth, Massachusetts. We always went to the same place: a forest where there had been a big fire a few years before.

“Burnt forests are bad news for Mother Nature but great news for blueberries,” Grandma said. “No better place on earth for blueberrying.”

She always handed out empty coffee cans (the kind with a snug-fitting plastic top) to hold the berries we picked. Soon as you took off the top a strong coffee smell rose up and tickled your nostrils. It sure gave you a peculiar feeling to have that coffee smell spilling out in the middle of a burnt-out forest.

Grandma was a picking machine; she could easily outpick the rest of us kids combined. “Pick, don’t eat!” she’d scold, but it was a pretend kind of scolding, half serious, half laugh. The little kids ate most of the berries they picked. For us older kids it was two berries in the can (plink! plink!), two in your mouth, two in the can, two in your mouth, until pretty soon your lips and tongue and teeth were stained such a dark blue that when Grandma asked, “Are you picking or munching those berries?” it didn’t do any good trying to lie, not with a mouth gone all blue like that.

Grandma’s summer visits meant blueberry everything: muffins, cakes, and turnovers. Best of all: pies. If you haven’t tasted Grandma Annie’s blueberry pie, warm, with a flaky crust, topped with a big scoop of goats’ milk vanilla ice cream (homemade from the Gonsalveses’ farm three streets away) melting streams of white into the dark blue filling, and felt in your mouth the delicious war between the warm pie and the cold ice cream, well, I feel awfully sorry for you. I really do.

“Coming blueberrying with us, Cynthia?” Grandma asked. We were in the kitchen gathering the empty coffee cans we’d need for picking.

“No, I’m not,” Cyn replied. She folded her arms. “I think it’s wrong.”

“Wrong?” I asked. “Why?”

“All sorts of wild animals need those berries to live on,” Cyn said. She peered at me, lips pressed together. “Ever consider that?”

Grandma looked surprised. We all did.

“What kind of wild animals?” Nate asked.

“Squirrels, turtles, lots of bird species!” Cyn said.

It bugged me to hear her use that word: species. Lately Cyn was starting to sound like a real know-it-all.

“Bears, too,” Cyn was saying. “That’s the problem with this world—nobody ever thinks about the animals.”

“I seriously doubt there’s any bears living out there,” Nate put in.

“We can feed the animals,” Brad told Cyn. “We’ll give them bread and cookies.”

“They need fresh fruit,” Cyn told him.

“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said.



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