Loose Leaf Notes

They come to fill buckets and pans, canning jars, freezer bags, pie crusts, and always, the everwaiting tongue. They come to visit and eat, to sate the hungers of loneliness and body. Though we offer only blueberries, they come wanting more. They come from the American Dream—CEOs and wealthy realtors, two kids piling out of just-washed SUVs, wives stylish in their special picking outfits. They come from communes named Left Bank, Abundant Dawn, and A Light Morning. They come tie-dyed, shoe-less, bra-less, bath-less. On a good day, thirty cars of pickers fill our one-acre field, strangers and friends all picking side-by-side …

So begins Jim Minick’s latest book The Blueberry Years, a memoir of his and his wife Sarah’s years as organic pick-your-own blueberry farmers in Floyd County.

The book is not only a re-counting of the Minicks’ farming experience.  It’s a snapshot history of Floyd throughout most of the 1990’s, recalling indirectly how Floyd’s back-to-the-land transplants, who began arriving in the county in the 1970’s, existed alongside its longtime natives.

So where was I, as a member of the back-to-the-land movement, during the blueberry years?  Unfortunately, I was not picking buckets of Jim and Sarah’s organic blueberries. I was living below the poverty level back then and didn’t have the money. By the time I was fully aware of the Minick’s pick-your-own blueberry field I was picking in my friend and neighbor Jayn’s large blueberry patch. She shared enough for me to bake a yearly birthday pie for my son Josh and for us to have some fresh eating.

I have to admit that I cheated. I know Jim and knew something of how the story would end. But I wasn’t sure exactly why he and Sarah decided to leave Floyd County, something I felt was the county’s loss. So I jumped ahead to the end of the story for more details before the full accounting of the planting, growing, picking and farmer’s market sales of the Minick’s 1,000 blueberry plants.

Jim changed the names of the pickers and market shoppers in his stories, but with just five words at the beginning of chapter 29 … Greta drives like she picks blueberries… I gasped. I knew who Jim was writing about and how that chapter would end. That knowing, along with shivers, aha’s, and some head nodding moments happened throughout my reading.

But there was also a lot I didn’t know. Sometimes I felt like Jim and I were like family members living under the same roof but with different perceptions and experiences.   He as a university writing teacher and blueberry farmer, and me as a single mother making jewelry for sale and teaching creative writing to the children at Floyd’s parent-run cooperative, Blue Mountain School, in trade for my young sons to go there. But we were both interested in becoming more self-sufficient, and, ultimately, as I discovered by reading Jim’s words, we had more in common than not.

I was surprised to discover that I’m briefly mentioned in the book, even though it was by way of a self-described alias that I sometimes used at the time to sign my poetry in our community’s homespun newsletter, the Museletter: Redmoon.

I enjoyed the intimate glimpse into the Minicks’ lives at the time, which happened concurrently with my own. Jim’s poetic storytelling brought me smack dab in the middle of his berry field that I sadly never visited in person. I found myself so drawn by his descriptions of blueberries that I wished it was July and that I was chomping as I was reading. I realized that the four plants we have in our garden now are not nearly enough.

Along with berry facts, lore and recipes, the bulk of Jim’s story – which I highly recommend – is about the hard work of small scale organic farming and the daily business of following a dream. There is also an underpinning of he and Sarah’s search for a sense of belonging in the county.

I’m not sure whether the Minicks slipped through the cracks in Floyd, between the old time local community and the transplanted alter-natives, or whether they were some of the firsts to begin to fill in those gaps, building a bridge to better connect the two. I know that since they moved out of the county, the bridge has gotten stronger, the community is more integrated, and the local foods movement they helped to pioneer is flourishing.

I think the Minicks would enjoy the Floyd of today. I think they were probably just ahead of their time.

~ Visit Jim’s webpage HERE. Read Anita Firebaugh’s (aka blogger Country Dew) review of the book for The Roanoke Times HERE. A story on a poetry swap at The Floyd Country Store that Jim, I and others participated in is HERE.