Julie Wields the Berry Picker

Picking wild blueberries
When Julie and Richard were four and six, I finished my Montessori training and we moved from California to Fairbanks. One of the wonderful things about the Alaskan Interior is the variety of incredible berries that grow wild and the amount of wilderness where they grow. There are raspberries and strawberries and salmon berries and smoke berries and high bush cranberries and lingon berries and, among the most plentiful and the most delicious, blueberries. Wild blueberries do not taste anything like farmed berries. They are much sweeter and fuller flavored.

Every weekend, and in the long, light Alaskan evenings after work, I took Julie and Richard picking throughout the summer. Often other adults, like my sister in law Janey or our neighbor Gloria, would go with us along with their children. Often we would go alone. We would take a picnic lunch and pick all day, taking home buckets of berries and I then made jam and syrup and wine and compote. Sometimes I would heat some with a little sugar and we would eat them hot over ice cream or make milk shakes from them. However, the berries I took home were the ones that Richard and I picked. The ones that Julie picked mostly ended up, not in the bucket, but in Julie.

I had two metal berry pickers, which Richard and I used. A good berry picker can increase your yield many fold, allowing the scooping of a fistful at at time. Julie became convinced that the reason that Richard and I filled our buckets and she didn't fill hers was that we had the pickers. She was, of course, partially right. Partially, I worked without much stopping and Richard almost never stopped, while Julie, as a typical five year old, stopped and examined the world, sat on the ground and picked berries one by one and ate them with slow deliberation, and in general spent her time just as she should.

But, she wanted to bring in two or three full buckets, like her brother and I did, and she insisted that if she were allowed to use the picker, she could. So, one day when it was just the three of us, I decided to let her try it. We had walked in to a patch about half a mile from the road, our car, and any other people. I explained to Julie that I would show her how to use the picker and she could have it as long as she wanted. At which point she grabbed it out of my hand, swung back and then forward, hit me in the forehead and knocked me out cold.

Think about poor Richard. Seven years old, out in the middle of the woods with an unconscious mother and a suddenly hysterical sister. Luckily I wasn't out more than a couple of minutes. When I came to, Richard was valiantly pulling me by the feet towards the road and Julie was trailing behind with the berry pickers and buckets crying about how she didn't mean it, was Mom going to die, who would they live with?

When I sat up, she very humbly handed me the berry picker without being told. She never asked to use it again, and when I offered it to her a few weeks later, she quietly waited for instruction before she wielded it. And she never, never swung it near another person.