TIMES RECORD • June 4, 2021
Our Town Common has no resident bears. Still, the nuts and berries found there bring on the mindset of a bear, and so, today I am his or her stand-in. We bears care most about food. Or the promise of it. Enough food leads to fat, and fat is winter’s warm sleep enabled. So this spring walk looks forward to: food. There is, of course, the time-honored, all-season grubbing for insects. But today, I’m not interested in tearing up logs or clawing into burrows; instead, I have purple sweetness in and on my mind. The wide spacing of this pitch-pine forest leaves plenty of light for the brush beneath the pines, and that light spurs the brush below. And each year, that light concentrates in blueberries that begin to ripen in early July. ~ Sandy Stott