Sunday, July 11, 2010

red blueberries




Standing in a field of blueberries, her face painted golden by the silence of the afternoon, she let a weight slip from her shoulders. She came into a zone. The sun and the breeze and the blueberries in her hands, so much smaller than grocery-store blueberries. It was like she had never seen a blueberry before. The camera in her mind saw the blueberry field around her as a slide show of still-life photographs, each brilliantly toned with the colors of hands and blueberries: the soil so rich and so brown, the stains on the pads of her fingers, a purple more red than violet, a purple more red than blue.  The sky slowed, then began to sparkle. The blueberries were red, not blue. And she devoted herself fully to the oddness of that experience.