I remember the first time I ate blueberries. We were going to Italy, to a family house in a small village lost in the Dolomite. We had stopped at a gas station with a convenience store on the side of the highway to grab a snack. It was in Austria, the weather was lovely, crisp and mild. In that shop, near the entrance was the fruits section and I saw blueberries. I had never had them before and I thought that they looked tasty. So I picked them up, eager to try something new, and from then on it became my favourite fruit. Blueberries are perfect in so many ways, they are a bit like candy but healthy candy. Juicy and sweet, but not messy like oranges or strawberries. They also have this popcorn quality where you can just have the bag open in front of you and grab into it without looking.
Blueberries are a fruit I don't eat often because I'm not even sure it grows in Belgium and if it does it must only be around May and June. Adding to that, they cost a lot of money, last I checked I paid 7€ for 500g and I was pretty happy about that price! I wonder what that does per blueberry, surely more than a cent, there are way less than 700 blueberries in a pack. And maybe less than 10 cents, cause I believe there might well be a few more than 70.
Sometimes I like to imagine fruits with personalities, well in fact, not just fruits but all sorts of things. And I believe blueberries would be chill things. I kinda see them as hippies, I could imagine a bunch of blueberries smoking pot in a field playing guitar and ukulele. They have got funny haircuts as well with their star shaped hole in the head. Or maybe I'm looking at them backwards and this is like the bottom of their dress.
Blueberries are a funny named thing. It's like humans had discovered berries for a while, some red, some pink, some black. Then someone saw these and was like "that's a berry, that's blue, that's a blueberry!". I like this kind of simple things, when they just make sense for what they are.
My cat Matcha loves blueberries as well. And you might think that it's quite odd cause cats don't like fruits usually, but to her, blueberries aren't food. They are a funny squishy ball you can plant your claws into. She'll just come on the counter when I'm preparing my breakfast and try to steal one to play with. She does that with pasta as well. She'll put her paw as far as possible in the pot that holds the pasta and grab one. Then proceed to throw it on the floor where it generally explodes in a bunch of tiny pieces. Then she plays with the pieces scattering them everywhere and leaving me a nice mess to clean up.
I realise I've never seen blueberries in nature, I wonder what their bush looks like. Well already to me they grow in a bush for some reason. I hope I'll never see them in nature, that way I can imagine whatever I want. To me they grow on very large bushes, that really don't grow tall. And they have spikes! There's gotta be a spiky thing protecting them, they're too chill to defend themselves, they'd just get eaten away otherwise. Well they do get eaten but like it's a little bit hard to get at least.
I wonder what other animal eats blueberries. Probably some birds, maybe foxes. And I'd love to imagine bears as well. It'd be so funny to find a big mama bear sitting in front of a blueberry bush trying to grab them with her huge hands and the face covered in purpleish mush. And I also like to think that I share some of my diet with bears. They are cool animals so I think if they do it, it must mean I'm cool as well.
Maybe ants like blueberries as well, I suspect they do in fact and for a very good reason. I've always been told ants can lift a-lot-of-times their weight or something and so I can imagine them playing blueberryball. It's like basketball but with blueberries. Since they are ants their nets are very low and so when the blueberries fall they simply bounce like basketballs. The rules are little different though cause it takes multiple ants to lift one blueberry. Hence why instead of teams of 5 they are teams of 50, and they group up to be able to lift the blueberry and pass it from one group to the other. I hope there's like a ant kingdom Kobe. A ant so good at blueberry ball that it is being talked about in all colonies over the earth.
I guess that before they become blue, blueberries have to be green or maybe white, I wonder what that looks like. I've never seen unripe blueberries. One thing I know though is that blueberries make for incredible paint! It has happened to me more than once to paint my white t-shirts with them. Some surrealist automatic painting, fall from my spoon and let gravity do the magic.
In French, blueberry is said myrtille, and I have no clue why. It's such an odd word cause none of myr or tille mean berry or blue! And no other berry ends with tille. Maybe it come from the name of some great adventurer. Sir Myrtille, he once went in the forest looking to chase a legendary dragon to get it's treasure. Realizing that there was no dragon nor treasure to be found, he brought the myrtilles back to the kingdom and pretended they were the fruits protected by the dragon! I heard that a similar story has happened in Asia, that's why dragon fruit is named dragon fruit.