August 26, 2020

Our neighbour enjoys selling blueberries to all her neighbours, including us. She is convinced that it’s what we all need. She picks them on the outskirts of the forest by her vila. After returning to the city, she comes upstairs by our door with her bucket. We bought a couple of kilos the other day. It wasn’t expensive. She asks us to buy them because she wants to get rid of them; she has too many for herself and is tired of making conserves, compotes, and jams, but can’t stop picking them. It’s probably some sort of blueberry greed. According to her, it’s recycling – giving blueberries to all of us. Or you could call it sharing, even if she asks for money. Blueberries are valuable enough not to haggle over. Very smart and kind of her. She is a good neighbour after all and doesn’t bother us otherwise.

I ate those blueberries a month ago. It made me think: which food that I have eaten in my lifetime can I still remember or crave? The food itself, not the circumstances. Disappointingly few compared to the total amount consumed. Way too few, perhaps. An alarmingly short list, even with wild blueberries included. Someone might object that I am exaggerating or should blame my memory, not the food. Hopefully, I am the only one who is most dissatisfied in this matter.

We ate blueberries in the evening, simply digging in with big spoons from bowls we each had on our knees. That was the trick – not one berry at a time, but stuffing our mouths full before chewing, then chewing, chewing, chewing. After I got used to the taste, there came a moment of revelation, in a language only the body understands. I was swallowing something that was not food anymore, or at least not how I knew food to be before. It was a different category. Blueberry juice going down my throat was nature’s music for my body’s ears, heard like a secret. My body was responding, and I was paying attention to it like never before. The music was something alive and was making me more alive. I ate and ate and ate and ate, sometimes with closed eyes. It tasted a little bit sour, but not too much – just the right amount of sour. Sour and juicy were combined to perfection. I didn’t know before that blueberries could talk to my body that way. For the first time, I was allowed to hear it. And that felt like arriving at a paradise inside of me.

A similar thing happened a year ago with cherries. We would both sit on my mother’s bed, each holding a bowl full of cherries. An empty plate for discarded seeds sat in the middle. We ate cherries every evening for two weeks – lots of them. At times, when we run out of cherries, I would take the public bus in the morning to go to the market and buy another five kilos of cherries for us. The cherries were from Greece, and the market price was close to nothing compared to the price in England. That’s why we ate tones of them, because I knew we would feel like kings. For the whole two weeks I stayed there, I was able to afford tons of cherries every day. No kidding. Our appetite for them didn’t diminish. We ate them in the evening while my mum took all her blood pressure pills one by one and told me stories from when she was young.

Another memory I am quite fond of is also related to berries. One day, when I was a child riding a bicycle like there is no tomorrow in my grandmother’s yard, my auntie came outside with a deep plate. She didn’t usually feed me, so it was quite unusual to see her with a plate, especially outside, in front of our neighbours. That’s why curiosity took over and I approached her on my bike. Without saying a word she gave me a spoonful of something. That moment I remember better than my first kiss – smashed strawberries with sugar. The unique taste of strawberry. How unprepared I was to get so much pleasure from just one spoonful .( I was expecting something like soup with onions, which I hate, from my auntie’s deep plate). And how little preparation you really need for this. And that wasn’t even my favourite auntie.

I must admit, things like that still happen to me from time to time, although not as often as I would like. And it’s not only regarding food. Since then, I have come across good things, or they have appeared in front of me. Sometimes it happens when I am doing something for the first time (like drinking from a well on a school trip), or when I finally do something the right way (like hitting that note). Most of the time, this happens because of the quantity, other times because of the content. It can emerge unexpectedly or be predicted. Very rarely, surely, but that’s not the point. The point is not how many times it happens, but how things are in the end. It helps me and allows me to hope that all of us – those people on the road in their cars – somehow, maybe, are happy.