Blue is my favorite color because it suits me. Though sometimes I can’t see the color blue, like when it looks an awful lot like the color purple. These damaged cones of mine really hold me back from realizing my true potential as an opinion holding human being. But that is all simple fluff in comparison to the truth, the fact remains that blue is my favorite color and purple is definitely not, even though they look pretty much the same.

What is blue in essence is blue enough for me, and blue is beautiful. Which is why I think blueberry patches are such a wonderful place. Fastidiously rowed bushes that rise perfectly below eye level, short enough for adults to see over and tall enough for children to hide behind. I can be a child too, if I lay myself between rows and look up. You see more berries that way and if the nature strikes you it can be such a small, simple pleasure to reach up into the pure sky and pull back a berry to your lips, eating the atmosphere itself.

When you find someone to act a child with you, life is always better. You can lay yourselves upon the grass, head to shoulder, yin to yang, amongst the bushes and take turns reaching upwards and outwards and inwards, chewing and swallowing and growing. I don’t think I have much potential for growing upwards anymore, but outwards and inwards suit me just fine. You grow plenty closer to other people and to yourself that way. Plus, then you have someone to share blueberries with.

War comes. Round little dimples that hurdle across the grass as you take turns trying to catch the fruit perfectly upon your tongue, contorting your neck and back into the perfect berry catching machine. You can spend hours like that, playing hungry hippos in the grass of the blueberry patch. You can and you should, because then no matter how old you get and no matter how heavy it becomes upon your shoulders then at least you can say you were once a mighty slayer of blueberries, and your partner was the most significant berry catapult that the world would ever see. And you were happy.

We can be children anytime we want. And we can learn what it feels like to taste the grass with our toes and how the forever blue of the sky looks compared to the splotchy depths of the berries in our palms. We won’t let them spoil, not a one. We can learn what sex is, and then love, and then we can learn what it is to make love because that is the only right way to do some things. We can discover words all over again, and conversation with all its minute intricacies. We can study connection, in the bugs that pick up the fallen fruit and in the power between us that grows and grows like a big beautiful field of blueberry bushes trapped by nothing but a sky that spans and spans across the stretch until you find yourself looking at the grass again. And then, when we are adults, we can walk out of Eden hand-in-hand, with our stomachs full of blueberries.