Blueberry Quotes

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...

What kind of tea do you want?" "There´s more than one kind of tea?...What do you have?" "Let´s see... Blueberry, Raspberry, Ginseng, Sleepytime, Green Tea, Green Tea with Lemon, Green Tea with Lemon and Honey, Liver Disaster, Ginger with Honey, Ginger Without Honey, Vanilla Almond, White Truffle Coconut, Chamomile, Blueberry Chamomile, Decaf Vanilla Walnut, Constant Comment and Earl Grey." -"I.. Uh...What are you having?... Did you make some of those up?

We walked on the beach, fed blue corn ships to the seagulls, and munched on blue jelly beans, blue saltwater taffy and all the other free samples my mom brought home from work. I guess I should explain the blue food. See, Gabe had once told my mom there was no such thing. They had this fight, which seemed like a really small thing at the time. But ever since, my mom went out of her way to eat blue. She baked blue birthday cakes. She mixed blueberry smoothies. She bought blue-corn tortilla chips and brought home blue candy from the shop.

Maybe one day it will be just you and me, my little blueberry," Magnus said conversationally. "But not for a long, long time. We'll take care of him, you and I. Won't we?" Max Lightwood made a happy burbling sound that Magnus took as agreement.

Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence.

A week ago someone warned me not to buy the blueberry muffins at Eddie's, but I didn't listen and bought them anyway. Now at odd hours I get these insatiable cravings." "They're laced with addictive substances.

I was making pancakes the other day and a fly flew into the kitchen. And that's when I realized that a spatula is a lot like a fly swatter. And a crushed fly is a lot like a blueberry. And a roommate is a lot like a fly eater.

He had a crush on a blueberry bush once.

They would think she was savoring the taste (blueberries, cinnamon, cream-excellent), but she was actually savoring the whole morning, trying to catch it, pin it down, keep it safe before all those precious moments became yet another memory.

Words can be worrisome, poeple complex, motives and manners unclear, grant her the wisdom to choose her path right, free from unkindness and fear.

patience, prayer and turmeric; the foundation, the corner stones of my journey out of the darkness. Each one of these elements has played a critical role in the process. Since October, in addition to a diet replete in anti-oxidant rich foods, I’ve been ingesting cayenne pepper and turmeric four times a day. The cayenne I mix in a glass of water; the turmeric is hidden in lemon or blueberry yogurt.

Let her tell stories and dance in the rain, somersault, tumble and run, her joys must be high as her sorrows are deep, let her grow like a weed in the sun.

Hannah's magic cure for every ill," he teased. "Blueberry cake and a kitten.

Simple,' Tummeler replied.' Blueberries is one of the great forces o'good in the world.' How do you figure that?' said Charles. Well,' said Tummeler, 'have you ever seen a troll, or a Wendigo, or,' he shuddered, 'a Shadow-Born ever eating a blueberry pie?' No,' Charles admitted. There y'go,' said Tummeler. It's cause they can't stand the goodness in it.' Can't argue with you there,' said Charles. Foods is good and evil, just like people, or badgers, or even scowlers.' Evil food?' said Charles. Parsnips,' said Tummeler, 'Them's as evil as they come.

I love you, mother of our blueberry-sized baby.

Indigo has a purifying, stabilizing, cleansing effect when fear, repression, and obsessions have disturbed your mental body. Indigo food vibrations are: blackberries, blue plums, blueberries, purple brocoli, beetroot, and purple grapes.

Kid 1: *examining my gorgeous strawberry and blueberry pies*: Wow, Mom, your pies don’t look awful this time. Me (Ilona): ... ~A little later~ Kid 2: *wandering into the kitchen* Kid 1: Hey, you’ve got to see these pies. *opening the stove* Kid 2: Wow. They are not ugly this time. Kid 1: I know, right?

For the life of her, she couldn't understand how such an obstinate, boneheaded chauvinist could make her pulse race and her insides turn to jelly.

It is nearly impossibly to be sad when eating a blueberry muffin. I'm pretty sure that's a scientific fact.

She had on an OBEY beanie, but had corrected it with a Sharpie so the word was now Disobey. What a fucking rebel. Someone should notify the authorities before she did something really crazy, like eat non-organic blueberries in the cafeteria.

My mother’s dress bears the stains of her life: blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk; She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow; Its brilliance nearly blinds me.

Sam loved to listen to music and make his own songs, to wear soft velvets, to play in the castle kitchen beside the cooks, drinking in the rich smells as he snitched lemon cakes and blueberry tarts. His passions were books and kittens and dancing, clumsy as he was.

After the woman left, I set my coffee down and opened the bag. Two muffins-double-chocolate and blueberry bran. I texted Adam a thank-you. I’d just started eating the chocolate muffin when he texted backPut that one down and eat the bran. It’s better foryou.

Carpe diem' doesn't mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible. 'Carpe diem' means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin servies. No R. Very different piece of advice. What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things--so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant--pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was.

You ever see Willy Wonka? You know that part where the girl eats an everlasting gobstopper sweet and it tastes of everything? Like chicken soup and roast beef and blueberry pie all rolled into one? Well, that's exactly what Shapeshifter blood tastes like...

Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.

watching a satyr cook Eggo blueberry waffles on a stick over an open fire.

I have found that some of the simplest things have given me the most pleasure. They didn't cost me a lot of money either. They just worked on my senses. Did you ever pick very large blueberries after a summer rain Walk through a grove of cottonwoods, open like a park, and see the blue sky beyond the shimmering gold of the leaves? Pull on dry woolen socks after you've peeled off the wet ones? Come in out of the subzero and shiver yourself warm in front of a wood fire? The world is full of such things.

I love how you look at me." [...] "And how's that?" I asked, blushing on cue. His lower lip curled in that mischievous way it did. "Like you're having a hard time deciding between my lips and this blueberry pie. And I know nothing comes between you and this pie." I giggled. "Very observant. Wonder which one will win?

kisses happen when my morning blueberry muffin sails slowly upon my savoring tongue.

How many blueberries are we talking here? Because I’m looking at a really big house that must have a lot of rooms to fill.

Blue is a tranquilizer, imparting coolness to your system. Blue slows down your system so it can heal and mend. Positive qualities of blue are willpower, aspiration, and reliability. Foods of the blue vibration are: grapes, blackberries, blue plums, blueberries, and any other blue fruits or vegetables.

Hannah’s magic cure for every ill,” Nat had said. “Blueberry cake and a kitten.” Kit smiled to see it working its charm on Prudence. But there was an invisible ingredient that made the cure unfailing. The Bible name for it was love.

My mother tells me I do not chew my food enough; she says I am making it harder for my body to get the essential nutrients it needs. If she were here, I would remind her that I am eating a blueberry Pop-Tart.

Liv, stop it!" hissed Mia. "You look like a lovelorn sheep!" I gave a start. "As bad as that? Oh, that's terrible." I added - and I was to regret it in the course of the day - "If you see me looking like that again, give me a nudge or throw something at me. Promise?" "With pleasure," said Mia, and three hours later, because she always kept her promises, I was black and blue around the ribs and had been hit by assorted flying objects: several chestnuts, a spoon, and a blueberry muffin.

Today a potato, a tomato, some wheat, lettuce, rice, a banana, and blueberries lost their lives for my sake.

During the day she carried her boy, bandaged and fed the wounded, leaving her own festering wounds until night-time when she licked them and nursed them, and remembered the pines and the fish and the river and the ase and the woods and the fire and the blueberries and the smell of cigarette smoke and the loud laughter coming from one male throat.

What crannies of untouched perception can you explore? What autumn was it that the moon entered your life? When was it that you picked blueberries at their quintessential moment? How long did you wait for your first true bike? Who are your angels? What are you thinking of? Not thinking of? What are you looking at? Not looking at?

Sex was absolutely not allowed to be scheduled, at least not by explicit discussion, but I had become familiar with the sequence of events likely to precipitate it: a blueberry muffin from Blue Sky Bakery, a triple shot of espresso from Otha’s, removal of my shirt, and my impersonation of Gregory Peck in the role of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.

I've heard of a third eye, but I didn't realize it was a googly eye. I thought it was mythical.

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion.

Dried oregano has thirty times the brain-healing antioxidant power of raw blueberries, forty-six times more than apples, and fifty-six times as much as strawberries, making it one of the most powerful brain cell protectors on the planet.

And I realized: souls don't stand alone. What makes a soul a soul is the shared burden and pain, the shared joy: it's the connection between us that carries on.

Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . . The first little washes flashing like thick rushing winds through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, sheering, cutting . . . forming branches. Then, through bear-berry and salmonberry, blueberry and blackberry, the branches crashing into creeks, into streams. Finally, in the foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark and silver spruce—and the green and blue mosaic of Douglas fir—

Summer rain smelled like newly clipped grass, like mouths stained red with berry juice - blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. It smelled like late nights spent pointing constellations out from their starry guises, freshly washed laundry drying outside on the line, like barbecues and stolen kisses in a 1932 Ford Coupe

She had two blueberries for eyes, and hair the color of strawberries. Too bad our love never made it past the kitchen and into the bedroom (or garage).

Not only does fruit fight cancer, it kills all types of viruses and bacteria. Certain fruits, such as bananas, wild blueberries, apples, and papayas, are the most powerful natural destroyers of viruses on earth. Fruit is also vital to gut health—which is essential to a healthy immune system. For example, the pectin in apples, and the skin, pulp, and fiber in figs and dates, are exceptionally effective at killing and/or clearing out anything that doesn’t belong in your intestinal tract, including fungi such as Candida, worms, and other parasites.

I guess that's the lesson in all of this-not to be eighty years old, looking back on your life, wondering if you made the right choice or how your life might have been different if you'd done one thing and not another.

Lose myself in your blueberry eyes Magnolia, kiss your mauve lips of grapes, squeeze your fleshy, milky macaroon breasts,smell your opium breath of subconsciousness, labyrinth of desires.

Oh, I’m not allowed to take art classes anymore,” Cricket said with a kind of carelessness he was pretty sure she was faking. “You can proooooobably guess why.” “Good heavens, Cricket,” he said, putting on the voice she’d used several times already. “No one has ever used that many colors on one piece of paper before. Look at this mess. Why can’t you just draw a normal blue blueberry like every other dragon?

Sadness is not always a terrible illness. Sadness is, perhaps, the most honest response to living.

After we became a couple, she composed our time together. She planned days as if they were artistic events. One afternoon we went to Tybee Island for a picnic; we ate blueberries and drank champagne tinted with curacao and listened to Miles Davis, and when I asked the name of her perfume, she said it was L'Heure Bleue. She talked about 'perfect moments.' One such moment happened that afternoon; she'd been napping; I lay next to her, reading. She said, 'I'll always remember the sounds of the sea and of pages turning, and the smell of L'Heure Bleue. For me they signify love.

In residency, I studied in a bookstore’s coffee shop, which was where a clutch of women gathered monthly for book club. They would set their library books and blueberry scones on the table. I started eavesdropping and realized that the books they read were just an excuse to talk about their own lives. Every character, every broken heart, every twist of fate inspired a story about an unruly mother-in-law, a philandering father, or the cousin who came out to his unforgiving parents. Sometimes it sounded more like a therapy session than a book discussion. I could never join a book club.

i didn't come here to be civil. i didn't come here to sit you down with a mug of tea & a blueberry muffin to coddle you as i try to convince you that respecting my existence is essential, you've had plenty of chances & you took a hard pass every time, so i came here to watch your anger overtake until you finally combust.

There isn’t much of a Goth or Wicca scene in Exeter, but I went to a few places I know and asked around. A lot of people wouldn’t talk to me because the Goths think I’m a bit of a baby bat, and the Wiccans think I’m a playgan.” “People think you’re — a bat,” Nick said slowly. “Well, of course. Many people think I’m a blueberry scone.

Sometimes you have to work hard for what you want. Sometimes, hard work is what makes it precious.

Your inner child was showing.

She depended on him to smooth her brow when her shit-on-a-stick life got too covered in poop sprinkles.

That woman could spread gossip faster than the flu in a whorehouse.

Shit storms are no fun to walk in with your mouth open.

I couldn’t tell you much about John 3:16, but I knew Blueberry Muffin: 426.

Raspberry, strawberry, lemon and lime What do I care Blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin and plum Call me for dinner Honey, I'll be there

My landlord is eating a blueberry-blooded Popsicle.

PIPER DIDN’T PLAN TO SHOOT BLUEBERRY MUFFINS.

Hannah! You've simply got to stop finding bodies. I swear you attract them like a magnet. If you're not careful, everyone's going to get the wrong impression of you." - Delores Swenson

There’s nothing to be scared of.” Instead of taking Charlie’s pulse – there was really no point – he took one of the old man’s hands in his. He saw Charlie’s wife pulling down a shade in the bedroom, wearing nothing but the slip of Belgian lace he’d bought her for their first anniversary; saw how the ponytail swung over one shoulder when she turned to look at him, her face lit in a smile that was all yes. He saw a Farmall tractor with a striped umbrella raised over the seat. He smelled bacon and heard Frank Sinatra singing ‘Come Fly with Me’ from a cracked Motorola radio sitting on a worktable littered with tools. He saw a hubcap full of rain reflecting a red barn. He tasted blueberries and gutted a deer and fished in some distant lake whose surface was dappled by steady autumn rain. He was sixty, dancing with his wife in the American Legion hall. He was thirty, splitting wood. He was five, wearing shorts and pulling a red wagon. Then the pictures blurred together, the way cards do when they’re shuffled in the hands of an expert, and the wind was blowing big snow down from the mountains, and in here was the silence and Azzie’s solemn watching eyes.

Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones–inkberry, lamb’s quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones–rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms. Attention is the beginning of devotion.

In one study, researchers asked athletes to eat about a cup and a half of blueberries every day for six weeks to see if the berries could reduce the oxidative stress caused by long-distance running.42 The blueberries succeeded, unsurprisingly, but a more important finding was their effect on natural killer cells. Normally, these cells decrease in number after a bout of prolonged endurance exercise, dropping by half to about one billion. But the athletes consuming blueberries actually doubled their killer cell counts, to more than four billion.

What crannies of untouched perception can you explore? What autumn was it that moon entered your life? When was it that you picked blueberries at their quintessential moment? How long did you wait for your first true bike? Who were your angels? What are you thinking of? Not thinking of? Writing can give you confidence, can train you to wake up.

You can't raise happy kids in a happy family if you aren't happy and don't know who you are. You can't pin your life on someone else's happiness.

Sometimes you were handed a second chance, and all you had to do was close your eyes and step into it.

You didn't date someone to change him. You dated him because you wanted him for the way he was. Flaws and fears and all.

So sometimes life puts a giant plate of steaming hot blueberry fucking pancakes on your table. It’s still down to you whether to eat them or say, ‘No, thanks.’ You can walk away from shite or pancakes. Wait for the next course, see if something tastier comes along.” “But it’s better, you think, to seize the pancakes?” “Aye!” John raised his empty tumbler to the approaching waitress. “Carpe pancakes!

The discussion was escalating into an argument when the Demeter head counselor offered one last suggestion. "What about this?" He held out a small red object. "Miniature explosive!" the Ares boy bellowed. "Duck!" "It's not an explosive or a duck," the Demeter boy said. "It's a berry native to this land. Grows all over the place here." The Aphrodite girl wrinkled her nose. "Excuse me, but ew! There are seeds all over the outside! So unattractive. And red? That colour is so overdone, fruit-wise." "Yes, but it's tasty," the Demeter counselor said. "I call it a strawberry. "Why?" the Athena girl wanted to know. "Because blueberry, raspberry, blackberry, and cranberry were taken.

Maureen O'Brien's Bakery Lingo: A Partial Glossary • 9 donuts - A shutout • 2 croissants - A full moon • 3 croissants - A ménage à trois • 4 bear claws - Full smokey • 2 bear claws - Half smokey • The last one of any item - The gift of the Magi • A baker's dozen of doughnut holes - a PG-13 • Anything in the unlikely quantity of 36 or a lot of something - A Wu-Tang • Blueberry muffin - Chubby Checker • Bran muffin - Warren G the regulator • Any customer who left no tip - A libertarian • Any customer who only tipped the coins from their change - A couch shaker • Any person who requested a substitution - Master and demander • Any person who requested TWO substitutions - Demander in chief • Any person who requested MORE than two substitutions - The new executive chef and finally.... • Any vegan customer - A Morrissey

He kissed her like his life depended on it, because it did, and like he’d die if they stopped, because he might, and because he never wanted to live another day of his life unless it included kissing Daisy Edwards.

Kate Moss famously said that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” So I thought I’d put together a little list of things she’s obviously never tried before that taste so much better than buying into an oppressive body ideal could ever feel: Pasta, pizza, mangoes, avocados, doughnuts, peanut butter, sushi, bacon, chocolate cake, lemon cake, any cake really, blueberries, garlic bread, smoked salmon, poached eggs, apples, roast dinners, cookie dough, sweet potatoes, whipped cream, freshly squeezed orange juice, watermelon, gelato, paella, oh and cheese. You’re welcome, Kate!

I ate at the same deli every day for a year because it was ten steps closer than any of the alternatives. I spent more money on sandwiches and blueberry muffins than I did on some of my bills, and they were bad sandwiches." "What about the muffins?" Evie asked. "They were fine," Felix shrugged

But what are you supposed to do now? I mean, how are you supposed to act normal?” Mike looked at me, his blueberry eyes searching. “I don’t know, Apron,” he said. “I was hoping you could tell me.” And then, just like that, I understood what my real job was this summer, and it had nothing to do with flowers.

She was going to cry in front of her childhood hero turned mega-crush turned object of her every sexual fantasy. Seriously, Travis was the reason she couldn’t hear “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” without getting horny. Meanwhile if she cried right now, he’d probably lose his boner next time he smelled blueberries. Of course, while all these thoughts raced through her head, she said absolutely nothing, simply stared up at the former Hurricanes shortstop while her eyes ached.

I am in the night of the stars. The moon is new and I see my way by focusing on the light given off by the Souls of the trees. The night air is thick and dark and sweet, like blueberries. It enters my nose and throat and ears to fill me up with its night magic. My ancestors are with me. They are in me. I can hear them. I felt them all day. My great grandmother, Lily Rose, came first. They will guide me with voices that flicker like lightening bugs, orange, hot, liquid glow in the moment.

And when you love someone, you find out what they need, and you take pleasure in offering it to them the best you can…

...and the story as it plays out in my mind is that I became a writer (if that was what it was) when I started to realise that I wasn't loved and that maybe I never would be. I was nineteen and poetry was snaking out of me because I felt badly treated, or I was newly aware that I'd colluded in my self-annihilation and the love I had sought up until then was shit. I became a writer when I learned that I was a person and not just a figure inside another person's libidinal imagination - I am still not entirely that, though, a person; still part of my brain is lobotomised by the fantasy of glory and worthiness in libidinal abjection and I have to somehow live with that.

Truth doesn't have a color. And it doesn't have a smell. It doesn't quiver or make noise. It doesn't shimmer. Yet it does - it does all these things, depending. Because truth is capricious. It may be hovering there all the while, but one moment you think you see it - it seems so clear, so well defined, as if you could catch it and hold it steady in your hand. But the next moment it's gone, or at least so fast moving it's a blur, at best. That's the thing Africa taught me about truth. You know it's truth because it's busy. Any seeming truth that's idle? Well, that's just not truth.

There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.

THOSE BORN UNDER Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain. Henry, our mother, and I were Pacific Northwest babies. At the first patter of raindrops on the roof, a comfortable melancholy settled over the house. The three of us spent dark, wet days wrapped in old quilts, sitting and sighing at the watery sky. Viviane, with her acute gift for smell, could close her eyes and know the season just by the smell of the rain. Summer rain smelled like newly clipped grass, like mouths stained red with berry juice — blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. It smelled like late nights spent pointing constellations out from their starry guises, freshly washed laundry drying outside on the line, like barbecues and stolen kisses in a 1932 Ford Coupe. The first of the many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man’s hands after hours spent in a woodshop. Fall rain was not Viviane’s favorite. Rain in the winter smelled simply like ice, the cold air burning the tips of ears, cheeks, and eyelashes. Winter rain was for hiding in quilts and blankets, for tying woolen scarves around noses and mouths — the moisture of rasping breaths stinging chapped lips. The first bout of warm spring rain caused normally respectable women to pull off their stockings and run through muddy puddles alongside their children. Viviane was convinced it was due to the way the rain smelled: like the earth, tulip bulbs, and dahlia roots. It smelled like the mud along a riverbed, like if she opened her mouth wide enough, she could taste the minerals in the air. Viviane could feel the heat of the rain against her fingers when she pressed her hand to the ground after a storm. But in 1959, the year Henry and I turned fifteen, those warm spring rains never arrived. March came and went without a single drop falling from the sky. The air that month smelled dry and flat. Viviane would wake up in the morning unsure of where she was or what she should be doing. Did the wash need to be hung on the line? Was there firewood to be brought in from the woodshed and stacked on the back porch? Even nature seemed confused. When the rains didn’t appear, the daffodil bulbs dried to dust in their beds of mulch and soil. The trees remained leafless, and the squirrels, without acorns to feed on and with nests to build, ran in confused circles below the bare limbs. The only person who seemed unfazed by the disappearance of the rain was my grandmother. Emilienne was not a Pacific Northwest baby nor a daffodil. Emilienne was more like a petunia. She needed the water but could do without the puddles and wet feet. She didn’t have any desire to ponder the gray skies. She found all the rain to be a bit of an inconvenience, to be honest.

The hospice fridge is filled with cream: ice cream, sour cream, heavy cream, cans and cans of whipped cream. There’s definitely a now or never feeling about food around here, and it makes you wonder what you think you might be waiting for in your own life. I mean, crusty, gooey mac and cheese? Thickly frosted éclairs? Velveeta melted over a plate of potato chips—what the nurses call the house nachos? Eat your kale and blueberries and whatever else, but go ahead. Have some of the good stuff now too. We

When the crops were thriving, Squanto took the men to the open forests where the turkey dwelled. He pointed out the nuts, seeds, and insects that the iridescent birds fed upon. He showed them the leaf nests of the squirrels and the hideouts of the skunks and raccoons. Walking silently along bear trails, he took them to the blueberry patches. He told them that deer moved about at sundown and sunrise. He took them inland to valleys where the deer congregated in winter and were easy to harvest. He walked the Pilgrims freely over the land. To Squanto, as to all Native Americans, the land did not belong to the people, people belonged to the land. He took the children into the meadows to pick wild strawberries. He showed them how to dig up the sweet roots of the wild Jerusalem artichoke. In mid-summer he led them to cranberry bogs and gooseberry patches. Together they gathered chestnuts, hickory nuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts in September. He paddled the boys into the harbor in his dugout canoe to set lobster pots made of reeds and sinew. While they waited to lift their pots, he taught them the creatures of the tidal pools.

She went through her memory for the time, for the day, she and and her husband told him all about what he should and should not do. No goin out into them woods without Papa or me knowin about it. No steppin foot out this house without them free papers, not even to go to the well or the privy. Say your prayers every night...Pick the blueberries close to the ground, son. Them the sweetest, I find. If a white man say the trees can talk, can dance, you just say yes right along, that you done seen em do it plenty of times. Don't look them people in the eye. You see a white woman riding toward you, get way off the road and go stand behind a tree. The uglier the white woman, the farther you go and the broader the tree. But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self. Don't go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there.

After her mother died and Adrienne and her father took up with wanderlust, Adrienne became exposed to new foods. For two years they lived in Maine, where in the summertime they ate lobster and white corn and small wild blueberries. They moved to Iowa for Adrienne's senior year of high school and they ate pork tenderloin fixed seventeen different ways. Adrienne did her first two years of college at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she lived above a Mexican cantina, which inspired a love of tamales and anything doused with habanero sauce. Then she transferred to Vanderbilt in Nashville, where she ate the best fried chicken she'd ever had in her life. And so on, and so on. Pad thai in Bangkok, stone crabs in Palm Beach, buffalo meat in Aspen. As she sat listening to Thatcher, she realized that though she knew nothing about restaurants, at least she knew something about food.

I like the disaster of the night sky, stars spilling this way and that as if they were upturned from a glass. I like the way good madness feels. I like the way laughter always spills. That's the word for it. It never just comes, it spills. I like the word 'again'. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. I like the quiet sound a coffee cup makes when it's set down on a wooden table. So hushed. So inviting. Like morning light yawning through the window and stretching out onto the kitchen floor. I like the way girls' lips look like they're stained with berries. I like the way morning light breaks like a prism through the empty wine bottles on our dusty apartment floor. Glasses empty except for the midnight hour. I like the way blueberries stain my fingers during the summer. I like the way light hits your eyes and turns it into a color that doesn't exist anywhere else other than in this moment. I want it all. I want the breeze to call my name as it rushes down my street, looking for me. I want to feel grass underneath my bare feet and I want to feel the sun kiss freckles onto my cheeks. I want to hear you yell hello as you make your way towards me, not goodbye as you have to go. That's just a little bit about me.

If there is always a question, and I believe there is, in this case it is this: where is home and what is freedom. The promise we accept is that freedom is the freedom to make ourselves anew, but in our hearts we are running home, running the right way round the roundabout, so is freedom the freedom to have a home even if home is a fenced-in square of lonely grass.

Healing Foods When you’re looking to boost the immune system and support the reproductive system, the best foods to concentrate on are wild blueberries, sesame tahini, avocados, black beans, asparagus, apples, spinach, black grapes, and cucumbers. They’ll help by variously providing antioxidants, preventing hot flashes, providing critical nutrients to fortify vital organs, reducing inflammation, and keeping hormone levels balanced. Herbs and Supplements to Address General Symptoms Silver hydrosol: kills viruses, bacteria, and other microbes on contact and supports the immune system. Zinc: kills viruses, boosts the immune system, and helps protect the endocrine system. Licorice root: aids the adrenal glands and helps balance the body’s levels of cortisol and cortisone. L-lysine: impairs the ability of virus cells to move and reproduce. Vitamin B12 (as methylcobalamin and/or adenosylcobalamin): strengthens the central nervous system. Nascent iodine: stabilizes and strengthens the thyroid and the rest of the endocrine system. Ashwagandha: fortifies the adrenal glands and helps balance the production of cortisol.

The chokecherries -- gregarious and chatty, perched on their branches calling out to everyone to strip them off. Wild plums -- sarcastic and timid at the same time -- called out from behind their leaves only to retreat into the brushy brambles where they lived. Raspberries and blackberries -- royal and corrupt princes -- braved it out in the full sun of forest clearings. Gooseberries and huckleberries -- reticent, tradition-bound and private -- lived on unbothered in the swamps. Cranberries and pincherries (those party-goers) draped themselves over the furniture of the branches and invited all passerby, birds and people, to join the party. The blueberries and wintergreen grew undisturbed -- calmly bourgeois -- in the carpeted hush of the big woods.

Here, There Are Blueberries When I see the bright clouds, a sky empty of moon and stars, I wonder what I am, that anyone should note me. Here there are blueberries, what should I fear? Here there is bread in thick slices, of whom should I be afraid? Under the swelling clouds, we spread our blankets. Here in this meadow, we open our baskets to unpack blueberries, whole bowls of them, berries not by the work of our hands, berries not by the work of our fingers. What taste the bright world has, whole fields without wires, the blackened moss, the clouds swelling at the edge of the meadow. And for this, I did nothing, not even wonder. You must live for something, they say. People don't live just to keep on living. But here is the quince tree, a sky bright and empty. Here there are blueberries, there is no need to note me.

Five Days • 6 apples • 1 bunch grapes • 20 ounces frozen peaches • 20 ounces frozen blueberries • 15 ounces frozen strawberries • 10 ounces frozen mixed berries • 6 ounces of mango chunks • 3 bananas • 1 bunch kale • 20 ounces spinach • 20 ounces spring mix greens • Stevia sweetener (packets) • Bag of ground flaxseeds (often in vitamin section) • Fruit and veggies of your choice to munch on (such as apples, carrots, celery, etc.) • Raw or unsalted nuts and seeds to snack on • Detox tea (by Triple Leaf or Yogi brands) • Sea salt (or any uniodized sea salt) • OPTIONAL: Non-dairy/plant-based protein powder, such as RAW Protein by Garden of Life or SunWarrior protein Food for the Last Five Days • 20 ounces frozen mango chunks • 20 ounces frozen peaches • 20 ounces frozen pineapple chunks • 10 ounces frozen mixed berries • 6 ounces frozen blueberries • 6 ounces frozen strawberries • 2 apples • 5 bananas • 1 bunch kale • 20 ounces spinach • 20 ounces spring mix greens • Fruit and veggies of your choice to munch on (such as apples, carrots, celery, etc.) • Raw or unsalted nuts and seeds to snack on CHAPTER FOUR How to Do the 10-Day Green Smoothie Cleanse The 10-Day Green Smoothie Cleanse is a truly health-transforming experience.

It was a very new love growing inside of her heart—so new and so young that she felt fiercely protective of it. As though the seed of love had been planted in the warm earth of her heart several weeks ago, just now it was starting to sprout roots she knew would climb deep into her soul, with tiny green tendrils that would one day burst through her to entangle with his. Too little warmth or water or sun could make the seed wither, and with all of her heart and all of her soul, she wanted this love to grow deep and tall and strong, because somewhere deep and certain inside of her, she knew what was happening between her and Stratton could be the love of a lifetime.

When we say that a narrative is, or is not, someone’s ‘story to tell’, what we unwittingly suggest is that when the story is yours, as in it happened within time as you directly experience it, you are given some power over it. Is this the biggest betrayal of pop psychology via talk therapy? That in language a person can find sufficient tools to erect a life undisturbed by demons? Or the thought, even, that a person can comprehend what it is they have lived through. - Survivors of all things, always trying to reconstruct the moment they survived through. - Strange, though, that even as you narrate it, you get to the horror point, and you think, this time, it’ll go differently. But the film reel keeps playing through, all the way, and, whoosh: powerless.

STAINS With red clay between my toes, and the sun setting over my head, the ghost of my mother blows in, riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord, riding on a honeysuckle breeze. Her teeth, the keys of a piano. I play her grinning ivory notes with cadenced fumbling fingers, splattered with paint, textured with scars. A song rises up from the belly of my past and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories. My mama’s dress bears the stains of her life: blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk; She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow; Its brilliance nearly blinds me. My fingers tire, as though I've played this song for years. The tune swells red, dying around the edges of a setting sun. A magnolia breeze blows in strong, a heavenly taxi sent to carry my mother home. She will not say goodbye. For there is no truth in spoken farewells. I am pregnant with a poem, my life lost in its stanzas. My mama steps out of her dress and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet. She stands alone: bathed, blooming, burdened with nothing of this world. Her body is naked and beautiful, her wings gray and scorched, her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine. I watch her departure, her flapping wings: She doesn’t look back, not even once, not even to whisper my name: Brenda. I lick the teeth of my piano mouth. With a painter’s hands, with a writer’s hands with rusty wrinkled hands, with hands soaked in the joys, the sorrows, the spills of my mother’s life, I pick up eighty-one years of stains And pull her dress over my head. Her stains look good on me.

How is my English?” Tatiana asked Alexander in English. “It’s good,” Alexander replied in English. It was late morning. They were walking through the dense deciduous riverbank woods a few kilometers from home, with two buckets for blueberries, and they were supposed to be talking only in English, but Tatiana backtracked and said in Russian, “I’m reading much better than I’m talking, I think. John Stuart Mill is simply unreadable now instead of unintelligible.” Alexander smiled. “That’s a fine distinction.” He yanked up a couple of mushrooms. “Tania, can we eat these?” Taking them out of his hands and throwing them back on the ground, Tatiana said, “Yes. But we will only be able to eat them once.” Alexander laughed. She said, “I have to teach you how to pick mushrooms, Shura. You can’t just rip them out of the ground like that.” “I have to teach you how to speak English, Tania,” said Alexander. In English, Tatiana continued, “This is my new husband, Alexander Barrington.” And in English, Alexander replied with a smile of pleasure on his face, “And this is my young wife, Tatiana Metanova.” He kissed the top of her braided head and in Russian said, “Tatiana, now say the other words I taught you.” She turned the color of a tomato. “No,” she stated firmly, in English. “I am not saying them.” “Please.” “No. Look for blueberries.” Still in English. She saw that Alexander couldn’t have been less interested in blueberries. “What about later? Will you say them later?” he asked. “Not now, not later,” Tatiana replied bravely. But she was not looking at him. Alexander drew her to him. “Later,” he continued in English, “I will insist that you please me by using your English-speaking tongue in bed with me.” Struggling slightly against him, Tatiana said in English, “It is good I am not understand what you say to me.” “I will show you what I mean,” said Alexander, putting down his bucket. “Later, later,” she acquiesced. “Now, pick up your backet. Collect blueberries.” “All right,” he said in English, not letting go of her. “And it’s bucket. Come on, Tania. Say the other words.” He held her. “Your shyness is an aphrodisiac to me. Say them.” Tatiana, breathless inside and out, said, “All right,” in English. “Pick up your bucket. Let us go house. I will practice love with you.” Alexander laughed. “Make love to you, Tania. Make love to you.