Beans and blueberries.

They say that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.
I wonder if women who pick blueberries in the stifling afternoon heat fit that category?
Ever pick blueberries? That vast expanse of box you want to fill looks a bit intimidating, doesn’t it, as you drop those lttle blue orbs one by one by one into that empty space: thunk, thunk thunk.... Such a vast space; such tiny berries.
This is crazy I said to myself, crazy, as I walked through the thick air from the market stand to the endless rows of blueberry bushes, marching in neat lines to the distant fence, waiting to be picked clean of their fruit.
A raucous shriek greeted me. My brain clicked into the “wonder what sort of bird that is” mode. Must be a hawk I thought I scanned the clear blue sky and spotted nothing.
It was when I heard the exact same sound a minute later that I realized it was a tape and that brain shredding sound--apparantly of a hawk catching a pigeon the clerk told me later, ---accompanied my random blueberry picking thoughts.
Having moved through the ‘this is crazy why are you doing this come back at 7 tomorrow’ mode, I began to glean the bushes closest to the end of the row...the farther back you go, the more berries there are, the clerk told me.
Well, duh, of course. I however, wanted to glean those nearby bushes. I liked that I was gleaning. In elementary school the nun gave us prints of paintings and we had to write something about each one. One of the pictures was Millet's The Gleaners. I remembered those heavily dressed gleaners in the painting, bent over, picking the leftover grain in a wheat field.
My heat muddled brain moved to the story of Ruth and Naomi and how Ruth went to glean the fields after the barley had been harvested; how there are several injunctions in the Bible insisting that farmers leave some of their field unharvested so that the poor could go and glean the fields. Neat idea, isn’t it.
There scant berries on the bushes close to the end so I walked on, pained by at the vast expanse of the box bottom, barely covered with little blue orbs, while my brain was assaulted by the intermittent salvo from the bird tape.
Several years ago 4 of us went to visit a project called Chacocente (www.outofthedump.org) in the lush, beautiful campo outside Managua. Our job was to pick beans for the community. We all trooped out to the bean field, gringos and residents, to extract the drying bean plants from among the weeds, gather them in bunches, fan them out into a skirt like bunch, and put them, roots up on the ground, Easier said than done. The heat even in mid morning was oppressive and the variety of bugs, challenging. After a while,though, I could pinch the most noxious looking bug between thumb and forefinger and toss it away. I picked and picked till I had a handful, twisted them into a bouquet like arrangement and placed them upside down on the ground.
Ah ha, I thought, well done. Yeah right. There is even an art to putting dried bean plants on the ground upside down I learned. In stark contrast to the taped shrieks of hawk and pigeon, my bean picking had been accompanied by the clear, round whistle of a bird perched in one of the grand, shade creating trees along the verge of the field. It sounded like a bobwhite. I could never see it, but the beauty of its sound gave me a peace that the heat and bugs couldn’t overcome.
Don Pedro, one of the respected and saintly members of the community, came over to me, and with hand gestures and words showed me the correct way to make the bunches.
Humph. Only dry plants, I mumbled to self. I persisted in trying to do it as he showed me. Confound it; bean plants; I wouldn’t be bested by bean plants. Finally he returned. He looked at my bunches, neatly marching in straight lines, skirts of brown spread out neatly, and he smiled and indicated via word and gesture that indeed, I had done it right. My day was made! Afterall, Don Pedro, who had suffered immensely in his life in the Managua City Dump before coming to Chacocente, was an elder, a man of great faith and wisdom, a titular leader of the community. To have him approve of my work was indeed priceless.

Thank you God that I don’t have to do this for a living, I muttered, scavanging the few remaining berries from the near bushes.
Documented, undocumented, migrant farm workers do work that few of us would willingly do; work that is unrelentingly hard.--we do enjoy the fruits of their labors, however, strawberries, lettuce, apples, all the fruits we gleefully consume.
I don’t think I could do stoop labor if someone had a gun to my head.
But stoop I did, getting into a strange zone...I’ll just pick one more bush...just one more, and so I proceeded down the row, picking, looking picking. The shrieking bird, the unrelenting sun and the increasingly heavy berry box pulled me away from my frenzy of picking; stop being a glutton I muttered to myself and proudly marched off with an almost full box of what would become a taste of summer in January’s blueberry pancakes.

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