Blue (#100)

There was a piece I wanted to write a couple of months ago now but didn’t quite manage to do it at the time. There are a number of reasons, including being too busy with many other things, but probably the main one is that I didn’t have the images to go with it. The piece was about blue, the colour, and I wanted to write it after walking with Lorraine out along Sailor’s Point and seeing blue everywhere – blue flags in every marshy spot, blue harebells next to granite boulders, blue vetch climbing, pointed blue-eyed grass pointing up, and blue sky and sea all around. However, I didn’t get back to capture the images while the flowers and their environs were in their full blue bloom, so there was no Blue piece back then, and my 100th blog post had to wait until now.


So, about a month ago, there was more blue, and this time I did manage a few images. The blue was in Ferguson’s Cove Cemetery, which was cleaned up and pruned back in May. The bloom on the blueberry bushes was significant this year, and the crop began to ripen up early in July, so we went with some small friends over to the cemetery to do some picking. On the bushes there was a mixture of real blueberry blue, with its dusty-looking matte finish, some purplish or pink, and some that were still white as they were still in their beginning stages of ripening, but it was enough for small fingers to pick enough to fill their mouths as well as the bottom layers of their containers.

The cemetery is a great spot for picking, not just because of the abundance of this year’s crop, but also because you can look out at the harbour any time you want (even take a break on the bench that Mike and Stephen built and installed there).

At one point, one of our four-year old friends from Istanbul looked up from his picking, most of which had ended up in his mouth, noticed our house, and said, “Look, there’s Canada!” Sure enough, there it was, the house the boys call “Canada”, as in “Are we going to Canada?” to mean “Are we going to your house?”


And in the house known as Canada, the true blue of the berries shone on the table for a bit, before they shone a little later on the top of some great little blueberry crumb cakes.


This is not, however, a post about blueberries, though you can find out a lot about them here, and details about their amazing health benefits here. It is about blue and occasions when it catches our attention, like that day of blue blooms at Sailor’s Point or the picking of blueberries under blue sky in Ferguson’s Cove Cemetery.

Or, if you prefer, it can be great songs titled Blue, like this lovely one, and this. Enjoy the blue.