This is blueberry and huckleberry season, and picking Vineyard berries has long been a favorite pastime of mine. In my childhood, the East Chop Downs were virtually blue with berries The Lagoon woods in the Oklahoma section were a tangle of berries too, and above Lake Tashmoo was another favorite berrying spot. You never told friends and neighbors where berries were to be found — particularly in those days in my early teens. Then a friend and I donned our shortest shorts and went from hotel to hotel in Oak Bluffs taking orders for fresh-picked blueberries for their pies. Either we charmed the produce buyers at the Island House and the Ocean View and the Wesley House with our shapely legs, or the berries we promised to gather could be advertised on the hotel menus as hand-picked Island blueberries. Whichever it was, the chefs gave us orders. Then we would scurry off to supply the fresh fruit. I remember we particularly liked being welcomed to the mysterious back door of the venerable Wesley House (now sadly renamed Summercamp.) If we peered through the kitchen, we could see the dining room tables laid with white table cloths and shiny cutlery and gleaming crystal.

We weren’t exactly well paid for our labors. We made just about enough money to buy pink wintergreen or brown chocolate popcorn bars at Darling’s (For 20 Years the Best) popcorn and candy store on Circuit avenue. But we had largely happy mornings in the woods listening to birdsong and the wind soughing in the pines and smelling wild roses and spicy yarrow. (Every now and then, a garter snake would terrify us slithering near our feet in the Lagoon underbrush). Only once that I can remember, were our berries curtly turned down. That was when we were offering huckleberries rather than blueberries and the disdainful Wesley House chef curtly told us: “Much too seedy for our caliber of guests.”

In later years, I found blueberries in abundance above Lake Tashmoo (on a hillside that today is covered with houses) and on the north side of Middle Road in West Tisbury, (Now, road crews have mowed down those berries. I suppose, for the benefit of cars). Last year, there were late-season berries off North Road, but this year, I am told, goats have been introduced to the area and the berries are all gone, many of the old bushes ruined.

I have cultivated blueberry bushes now growing in my backyard, and the berries are far bigger and fatter than the wild variety. I like picking them too, but I lack the same ardor that I have for berry picking in the woods. Then last weekend, my berry picking took a new turn.

Finding few wild berries anywhere, and having picked all those on my cultivated bushes, I broke down on Saturday and bought a plastic box full of Stop & Shop blueberries. My West Tisbury neighbor, Ann Burt, told me they were on sale — two for the price of one — in Vineyard Haven. The off-Island guests due for dinner had expressly asked for a blueberry pie.

But there was traffic everywhere of course, and no parking places to be had until I neared Grace Episcopal Church. So supermarket plastic bags and boxes in hand, I clambered up Union street to Main after making my purchases, and headed back toward my car. But the wind was blowing. The plastic bags were flapping. I was overburdened. Suddenly the blueberries from my plastic Stop & Shop box were rolling in the Main street gutter.

Blueberry picker that I have been for some seven decades, stooping down to pick up blueberries was an automatic reflex. On hands and knees, I picked up berries strewn below the curb. Even harassed drivers seeking a parking place generously passed me by where I knelt, gathering berries one by one. Somewhat mystified passersby asked if they could help me, but, secretive berry picker that I have always been, I couldn’t — even when the berries were in the gutter — accept berry-picking help. Of course, there was no sound of soughing pines, no twittering birds and no fragrance of wild roses in the Main street air. But there they were — blueberries to be had just for the picking — and after a lifetime of doing it, I couldn’t resist.

As for my dinner guests, until now, I have not divulged where I did my blueberry picking for the pie I served them. I can assure them, however, that the berries were well washed.