We have little choice in the matter when it comes to food memories; they choose us. Of what we do remember from childhood, inconsequential details rise up from our subconscious when the nerves are triggered, whether we're prepared or not.

When there are blueberries, I think of Christmas morning. Before my brother and I would arrive bleary-eyed and still in our pajamas to the living room, my mom had baked blueberry and poppy seed muffins. I also think of my grandmother. When I took a food writing workshop with Dianne Jacob earlier this year, a writing exercise focused on one object we could see from our chair. I chose blueberries, and they became the color of my grandmother's eyes as I remembered her in the kitchen, making goat's milk ice cream on a hot summer day.

This is what I wrote.

"Two blueberries lean together on a white napkin. They are the eyes of my grandmother, piercing me from the doorway in her small kitchen, gesturing that the ice cream is ready. Icy, freshly churned in the wooden bucket, we eat it together on the porch at dusk, and in the first, sloppy bite, is summer's entirety. The long season sloshing around in my stomach, like a caged bird longing to be free."