Wild Treasure

We crossed the Vermillion River and pulled off onto the shoulder as  instructed. “Look for sunny hills,” he told me. “Really, they’re everywhere. I’ve heard it’s a great season.”

It was going to be women’s work – girl’s work too – crouched under the July sun, nestled in the shrubby groundcover, squinting for treasure. There were the wild blueberries, of course, but also slyly hidden strawberries the size of a baby’s thumbnail, ripe for the picking. They collapsed between my thumb and index finger releasing their sweet smell onto my hands and into the air, and then their warm, perfect taste across my tongue. That smell from our hands would stay with us the rest of the day, expanding in the heat of the van and circulating on the currents from open windows.

This is exactly what summer smells like I think, trying hard to hold on to a thing I know cannot be caught. There are other smells, too, of crushed or brushed plants releasing their sagey, antiseptic oils. “It reminds me of lavender,” Bella says. She tells me this is her zen work, berry picking, unaffected by the thunder of transports on the highway below. We will work for a half hour or so and end up with two pints of wild treasure to be eaten with vanilla yogourt this afternoon. She is already planning for the raspberries and the saskatoons that are to come.

There is ritual to our picking: a marking of passing summers, of simple things that we love, of time spent together, of children growing up.