I just finished washing the dishes. We had a big meal today at home because my Father in law is winging his way back to his home in Florida tomorrow. I also had to clean up all the residue from a blueberry pie Claudia baked. “Most Delicious” as the Tan Man would say with his eyes closed in delight. Even at a month shy of two he’s got excellent taste buds. We went out this morning to pick blueberries near Cloquet.
Dad and I had already picked twenty pounds of raspberries a few days earlier at Lakewood Berry Farm. Its owner Dr. Aas greeted us and I introduced my Father in law explaining that we had purchased the used of the good Doctor’s Danish farm house a few years earlier in a fundraiser for the Bong Memorial in Superior. Claudia and I had a great time there and I posted pictures here on the blog which you can probably find if you type Denmark into the search function. Dr. Aas told us he would be leaving for his Danish summer home shortly. In addition to the berries I had an invitation from Gary Glass to pick pie cherries at his home and drove Dad there from the Berry Farm by way of Hawk Ridge and Seven Bridges road. We have a couple cherry pies to look forward to.
My Father in law gets a dose of Red Plan whenever he comes to visit Duluth. There was the yelling incident the other day and while we were picking blueberries today one of the fellows who manages the property asked if I wasn’t Harry Welty. I said that might depend on whether that was good or bad. Dad got an earful with me. The fellow lives in the Cloquet School District and his kids attended Hermantown’s schools. The Red Plan didn’t make much sense to him and he told me how he had recently visited the Nursing home on London Road at 40th Ave East. The traffic had been so terrible he couldn’t imagine what it would be like once they built a high school at Ordean. I told him what a low opinion I had come to have of bureaucrats, who like contractors, seem more preoccupied with their paychecks than the public good.
I told the fellow that when I moved to Duluth 35 years ago Duluth had tried to annex Hermantown but that they way people were flooding out of Duluth pretty soon it would be Hermantown doing all the annexing.
We had four adults picking berries and the Tan Man who, because he needed some attention, effectively left us with three able bodied pickers. My Son had been asked to join us by his Grandfather and had good naturedly agreed to get up at the ungodly hour of 8AM on a Saturday morning to come with us. I kept every hard at picking for an hour and a half.
It had rained the night before and it was pea soup when we got to Proctor on our way out the the Canosia Road. We went through one downpour and it looked like we had really picked the wrong day for blueberries. Not at all, it turned out. It was damp and my jeans were wet by picking’s end but we had seventeen pounds of blueberries. It was my job to wash dry freeze and bag them when we got home. I’m keeping the blues but I’m giving all my raspberries to the Duluth School Board.
