A True Story About A Special Kind Of Huckleberry My Family Discovered
The is a true story. It's as accurate as I can get it. You should be warned, there may appear to be some swearing, on every one's part.
My mother, my Vatti, my brother and I were on a road trip, one of many in the coming years. We were in Montana and we'd gotten over the initial road trip excitement. My brother and I had even managed to play a few hands of poker before remembering how much we hated being stuck together in the car. Boredom had set in, as it inevitably does. Everyone was just staring out the windows, or driving, in my Vatti's case.
Every state has a special produce it boasts, apples or potatoes, and in Montana, it was huckleberries. There were huckleberry smoothies, huckleberry jam, huckleberry milk shakes, huckleberry pies, huckleberry lip balm. All of which were advertised on big wooden signs all along the road. My brother, oh Speaker of the Obvious, said: "There sure are a lot of huckleberry things around here".
But that's not what my mother heard...
"Did you just say, 'there are a lot of fuckleberry things around here'?!". Yes, the fuckleberry. We went to Montana to see glaciers but the things that still springs to my mind first when I think of Montana is fuckleberry.
We stayed in a crappy motel that night, and laughed for hours about all the fuckleberry things. Fuckleberry milk shakes. Fuckleberry pies. Fuckleberry jelly. We started buying huckleberry things, just so we could show it to the rest of the family, in a whisper proclaiming the new fuckleberry product that we'd purchased.
The rest of the entire trip was a blur of fuckleberry jokes, exchanged in hushed voices, in restaurants as we ordered a huckleberry pie of shake. Everyone knew to whisper about it in public, except, of course, me.
I was not, what you would call, a subtle child. I was the one, skipping ahead of the family through a grocery store in Montana, loudly proclaiming,
"Hey! Mom! Look! They have Fuckleberry ice cream!"