The princess and the blueberry

by Susan Anderson
Tuesday, April 8, 2008 2:17 PM MDT

There’s a blueberry missing in my car, and I don’t mean a telephone.

The reason this matters is that I have a new car, the car of my dreams, really. It has all the extras that I ever wanted, and it still smells new.

So I’ve undergone a personality change and become a female version of Mr. Clean. As a mom, I long ago realized that food and drink would occasionally wind up hidden under the front seat, where they would start to smell when the weather turned warm.

The only prevention is banning all traveling food. But anyone who picks kids up after school and takes them somewhere for another activity knows that if they don’t eat in the car, they won’t eat at all.

So I lived with the stain on the passenger seat that was once ranch dressing. And I tried not to get too excited when one young passenger jostled another and a milkshake wound up on the floor. There’s nothing quite like what milk products smell like in a carpet after a while.

I can’t blame all this on children. Before they came along, I would dash out at lunchtime and buy soup, which I once set on the dashboard for a moment while driving. That didn’t work out so well, and the fact that my husband still married me after seeing the broccoli-cheese soup encrusted on the dashboard says a lot.

Not a pretty picture

But that’s all behind me now that I’ve become nearly obsessed with keeping the car clean and, above all, sweet smelling. Ask my young daughter about the gelato that she left on an armrest and how well I coped with the sight of it spilled on the floor. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

So, imagine my horror when I added to the missing foodstuffs in the car. I was eating blueberries by the handful from the container that I had just bought.

It was late in the afternoon, at the “Give me food now” hour when blood sugar levels drop. That energy crash was strong enough for me to ignore the obvious risk of driving while picking up small, slippery berries.

After downing one handful, I swear that one of the berries just slid out of my hand. My first thought was that it, with all its berry stain potential, may have gone down the front of my new, crisp white blouse. Or maybe it was in the pocket of the suit jacket that required dry cleaning.

The worst possibility was that it somehow was ground into the driver’s seat, waiting to stain the next pair of pants it encountered.

You would have thought that a wasp had flown down my blouse. I pulled over, jumped out of the car, and gave an imitation of a person with red ants in her pants.

First I shook the blouse, but nothing came out. I jumped up and down to see if a berry was lodged in my clothes, then emptied out the coat pockets. I looked here, I looked there and nowhere was the missing blueberry.

Now when I sit in the brand-new car, I sometimes act like the princess in the story of “The Princess and the Pea.” I just know there’s a berry in there somewhere, and I begin to think I can feel it.

You might say I’m obsessed, but I’m not having nightmares about it -- yet.

There’s no real solution to this problem until the wandering blueberry turns up, hopefully not pasted into the bottom of my jacket pocket or lurking in the carpet, waiting to ripen and smell like old berries.

Until then, my entire family is wishing I would just go out and buy a 20-year-old pickup with broccoli soup residue already glued to the dashboard.

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