In the steep field tilting uphill behind my house, nothing grows so well as wild blueberries. This year, there is a lush crop.

That is, the field grows blueberries and brush. The latter threatens both the blueberries and my sense of open space around the house, which so satisfies my midwestern soul. I spend a good deal of my summer figuring out how to encourage one and discourage the other. For fear of burning down the house and barn, I don’t use fire, the traditional blueberry field management, which would certainly do the trick. This summer, I am spending hours mowing and cutting brush.

Probably, if I stopped to figure my time and investment in the process, the blueberries I bring into the house would cost about $100 a quart. That’s just for the privilege of seeing blueberry plants continue in the field, and managing it so some bear one year and some the next, since the berries appear on stems grown the year before. (If you mow every year, you won’t have berries.) When the fieldwork’s done, I still have the work of picking the berries.

Many years ago, I took a pint of fresh, clean-picked wild berries from my field to my old friend Ruby. “Blueberries,” she said. “They’re a lot of work. You have to pick them, and clean them, and then bake with them or can them”

“These are already picked for you, Ruby,” I told her.

But she was just getting wound up. She told me what blueberries meant to her.

In blueberry season, when she was a child, her father would suggest a Sunday picnic. She and her mother would pack a basket, the family would pile into the car, and they would drive out to the blueberry fields. After picnicking, she and her mother would handpick the ripe wild berries. Later, they would take them home and bake pies and muffins and make sauce.

All that was well and good, but her father and brother were too impatient to pick. They would rake the berries, box after box of them. The raked berries were full of twigs and leaves and hard little green berries. They were brought home too. When Ruby and her mother had finished using the clean picked berries, they set to canning the raked ones. By the end of the week, when the berries were getting soft and winy, they were still doing the laborious, messy job of canning. By Saturday they were finished, and on Sunday, her father would suggest another picnic.

Ruby learned to hate blueberries, but I have not. I love the fresh berries on my cereal and everything I make from them. But I have learned it’s not really the berries I love. It’s the picking of them.

I don’t mind that my berry-loving friends find the small wild blueberries too much work. I like being alone. I like wandering up the field looking for the best patches. This year, the berries are so thick I often find myself painted into perplexing corners where I can’t step but for crushing them.

I like going out early in the morning for the household’s breakfast berries. The low rays of the early sun might warm my shoulders, I might be wet up to my knees with the morning dew, or the air might be muggy and the insects buzzing around my head, but I am happy. Or it’s different than happy; it’s a kind of deep contentment.

It’s been this way for years. It doesn’t matter if good things or troubling things are going on in my life, I have this feeling in the blueberry patch.

I might hear the gobbling of the turkeys from across the brook, sounding for all the world like they’re having a family quarrel. I might find the tiny orchid called Lady’s Tresses. If anything happens at all, it’s usually just a little thing, not much to remark on, but I am part of it.

I have a poet friend who insists that the great sadness of being human is feeling forever separate from nature, and never being able to bridge the gap. When I am in the blueberry field, I beg to differ with him.

I might hear a slow, steady wing beat overhead, and look up to see a pileated woodpecker looking as magnificent as the most exotically plumed parrot. When he disappears at the border of the field, I hear him call as he finds a tree to his liking, and then comes the deep, impossibly slow beat as he spikes the tree with his bill looking for insects.

I am settled enough into the quiet rhythms of the morning to think I hear a message in this sound.

“Do one thing at a time,” the bird tells me. “Do it unhurriedly, do it with love, and do it well.”

For me, that is blueberries.