Nature Pie

First things first, the neighbour girl spontaneously drew a picture of Mark this week.


Now then.

After the blueberry pickers left the field down the road earlier this week, they kindly took down their "private property" sign. We took that as an obvious invitation and scrounged up some buckets. The boy next door was over and insisted that we should pick raspberries that were growing somewhere in the woods instead. Mark liked that idea, so the boy next door set off in the lead to show us where the secret raspberries were.

It didn't work out so well. We went tromping through the woods for a few minutes, and then the kid pointed to a particularly dense clump of underbrush and said "they're there". Yeah. Everyone stood around staring at the underbrush for a minute, and then I announced that I wasn't going in there if there were no raspberries. The boy next door hesitated, then waded in, and came back a minute later empty-handed.

No raspberries!

We reverted to our original plan and took a short-cut through the woods toward the blueberry field. We found blackberries along the way, and then some poisonous-looking mystery berries, and the boys got giggly and started suggesting all sorts of woodland things to throw in the bucket. Sticks. Weeds. Deer poop.

We could make NATURE PIE!!

The blueberry pickers had missed a large section of berries along the edge of the field so it was easy pickings. I kept half an eye out for the local black bear while we filled our buckets, and I soon found myself thinking about my grandparents' house on the easternmost edge of Cape Breton Island. There was (and still is) a large wild blueberry field behind their house, and as a child I'd spent many summer days picking berries and catching frogs in that field with a neighbour child that my sister and I had nick-named "Dirty-Face". I haven't picked blueberries in years!

It's such a quintessentially Nova-Scotian thing to do - I'm glad we found some berries on our first summer back and actually got off our lazy butts to pick them.

THEN, my dad trumped us by bringing home almost 30 pounds of wild blueberries that he'd bought for an astoundingly low price from someone he works with. Only catch: They needed to be cleaned.

Ever cleaned 30 pounds of blueberries? It took HOURS. And now we have more blueberries than anyone knows what to do with. Yay for country summers!

Speaking of which, the Exhibition came to Truro. We went and it was too ridiculous for words. Mark and I and our friend Kim went to see some sort of contests that turned out to be very rodeo-ish. It mostly involved mixing hyper children with bewildered barnyard animals in as dangerous a way as possible.

At one point they placed small children on the backs of sheep and sent the sheep running around in the dirt. The kids invariably flew off in a cloud of dust and the audience went wild. There were contests of this nature for, like, FOUR HOURS. Words cannot describe it. Here are some pictures intead:





Yee haw!