It's all in the neighborhood

Six thousand miles … that’s a long way to go for breakfast.

Still, that’s how far they’d traveled, the blueberries that is. All the way from central Chile. Fresh blueberries, served up with nice hot Quaker Oats on a Minnesota morning when the temperature outside struggled to make it past zero degrees.

Fresh blueberries. As a kid, they were the rarest of treats. Literally something we’d stumble onto if we were fortunate enough to be Up North fishing on the few days when the wild berry patches came ripe and we’d take a few hours away from the pursuit of sunnies and northern pike to pick enough for Mom to serve up with ice cream after supper and mix into the next morning’s pancakes. So good and so special. A once a year thing, maybe, if we were really lucky.

Looking out at the drifts, toes still tingling from taking the dog out for his morning duty, all the while savoring fresh, sweet blueberries put me to thinking how really, really lucky we all are. And how fragile that overwhelming that well-being may well be.

Not that many generations ago people pretty much lived where they lived. When this Mississippi sandbar was first settled, from my house to Stockton and back was a hard day’s journey – not fifteen minutes over the hill and back. Stuff that came from far away was expensive and hard to come by. The source of most of what you had, used and lived on was generally pretty close at hand.

Not so anymore. It used to be that most farmers around here grew oats – not any more. The oatmeal I spooned along with those South American blueberries grew a good distance from here. The Folger’s in my cup traveled at least as far as the berries it washed down – even if it wasn’t the best part of wakin’ up. The iPhone I checked for the weather forecast was assembled in China from parts and materials gathered from pretty much everywhere. The shirt I’m wearing was sewn somewhere in Bangladesh – which didn’t even become a country until after I was old enough to vote – and the shirt than hung next to it was made in Vietnam – whether that was in the north or the south doesn’t much  matter anymore.

The paper I picked up off my doorstep was likely made in Canada, but the news printed on it came from everywhere and nowhere, and if it didn’t give me an adequate Trump Derangement Syndrome fix there was plenty more where that came from just a couple keystrokes away.

I hadn’t made it to the shower, but it took no more than breakfast to take me across better than half the world.

When I think of it, it’s amazing.

Like fresh blueberries. In March. In Minnesota.

For less than I’m used to paying for a gallon of gas…

Then again, that gasoline doesn’t come from anywhere around here either.

Neither does the natural gas that fires the furnace that keeps my toes toasty while the world outside my window is frozen hard as granite

Left to my own devices I might survive … for a while. There are trees, and a wood fire would keep me warm – if I could figure out how to build a stove. There are fish in the Mississippi, if I could catch them. But the truth is, alone we’re not likely to last too long.

But together, well that’s a different story.  Many hands, the old saying goes, make light work. And  the more of us working together, looking out for each other, helping when we can, getting helped when we need it … we haven’t seen the limit to what we can do. If we don’t screw things up we can all get along pretty well …  really well … blueberries in mid-winter well.

And it doesn’t get much better than that.