Berry Blues

"Hey, back from the gardening center already? Wha'd you buy?"

"I got a couple of blueberry bushes and a fig tree."

"Nice going! Blueberry pancakes in the morning and pork with figs on Wednesday."

"Uh, how do you figure that?"

"Easy peasy! Blueberries are ready to harvest in 4 hours and figs take a couple of days max. I'll go upstairs and print out some recipes."

"Not so fast, Emeril, how do you figure blueberries grow to harvest in 4 hours?"

"Aw, come on! I'm an expert blueberry farmer on FarmVille. You know, that farm game on Facebook. And figs, too. I've got an entire orchard of figs. Never actually thought of planting a real fig tree. How tall do they get? Do I need to go out and buy a ladder."

"A ladder? What for?"

"To harvest the figs on Wednesday, silly! I guess I could wait until Wednesday morning, see how tall the tree is and get the ladder then. You're right, that's more prudent."

"Do you know anything about blueberries or figs? I mean, really."

"Yeah, I know everything. It's pretty simple, actually. You click to create a plot of fallow ground, then you click to plow it, then you select blueberries and click to plant them. Then you wait 4 hours for the blueberry bushes to grow, click to harvest them and you're done!"

"What happens to the blueberries after you click to harvest them?"

I had to ponder that one. It was outside my Facebook worldview, but shortly I made the connection.

"Somehow they get transported in little plastic tubs to Kroger's," I offered as a reasonable explanation."

My wife considered this revelation carefully.

"Tell you what," she said at length, "we'll plant the blueberry bushes this afternoon. By the time we're asleep the berries will have been harvested and by morning they'll be at Kroger's in little tubs."

I nodded. She's a genius, my wife. I jumped on the thread.

"And I could get up early, go to Kroger's before breakfast, buy the berries, which are technically ours to begin with, but who's to argue with the right for Kroger's to make a little profit along the way, and we can still have blueberry pancakes!"

My wife smiled at me as she does to bichon frise owners or Volvo drivers, but to be fair a Volvo may have just driven by.

I smiled, too. Because I knew that from here on I could go up to Kroger's at any time and pick up my very own blueberries.

It's good to be king.

Now, about those figs ...