Blueberries
I don't think I've ever mentioned this before, but I love blueberries. They're my favorite berry, and one of my favorite kinds of fuit. What I will be doing in the following paragraphs are pretty much ranting about them and dedicating a bit of prose towards them. This is what happens when you put blueberry and words together.
The thing about blueberries is their subtleness, really. Every thing from the taste to color to size of them. They're small, slightly circular and yet flattened out into this (for some inconceivable reason) cute little shape. The outside skin is that famous blue, not electric blue or sky blue, but their own unique shade. Dark, but not deep. Almost black, but with a faint tinge of blue coloring its contours. After washing they are not of an even color, instead a smooth blending like a palette of soft colors mixed into one. They mix from dark blue, with a faint hint of purple at the horizon, and then smoothly transitioning to a faint blue that seems to be covered in a thin layer of frost. At the top is a small indent where the stem that once connected the blueberry to the bush once was. Most of the time it's an irregular shape, but sometimes it is the perfect shape of a star. The inside flesh is not blue as one would have it, but a light pale green.
The taste is somewhat of a hunt. Sometimes it's tart, sometime's it's bland, with a hint of both sweet and sour teasing the tip of your tongue. Rarely do you ever find that perfect blueberry taste. I've tasted it before, and so rather than the regular taste that artificial blueberry flavored things has labeled, my own perfect taste of blueberry is different. You have to root for this berry, because it's neither the biggest nor the smallest, the hardest nor the softest. Oftentimes I pop a blueberry into my mouth without the slightest idea and the taste bursts into my mouth like a tiny bit of magic, subtly sweet and pure and carrying this distinctive taste that you try to hold on in your mouth as long as you can. But the taste never lasts long, fading away and causing you to move onto the next blueberry.
Ah. I've just found one as I was writing this. The taste is poignant, like a...perfume, transformed into taste, not smell. Not overpowering, but simple, dispersed throughout its flesh. It strikes the back of your tongue, sending a wave of coolness over it and delighting the mouth, lingering in the throat. A deep, fleeting taste that floods up to the roof of your mouth before slipping away. It's lovely.
That was the taste that first made me fall in love with blueberries. At the time so many berries in one basket were the perfect blueberry, the perfect taste. I bought blueberry yesterday for the first time in a long while. So many sour berries, overwrought with tartness, and some of them bland--but each time I stumble upon the perfect blueberry I feel a tiny bit triumphant, a tiny bit nostalgic.