Mama's Blueberry Pie

by E. Alan Meece
UU Band of Writers
Feb.6, 2021
prompt: Selling Something. Write an ad for something you want to sell, be it imaginary, real, owned by you or not, material or immaterial, large, microscopic...

Mama grew up in Pennsylvania. Her hobby was making blueberry pie. All the kids loved it, so she made it her business. And she sold it on TV, so we'll share some of her ads in this essay. But living in Pennsylvania there was a lot of acid rain, and often the blueberries were turned into blackberries. And Mama's Daddy died of emphysema. So when the climate crisis began, Mama decided her berries had to go green. So she started growing the blueberries in Greenland. In fact, these blue berries were so cold there that they turned green. So Mama changed the name to Mama's Greenberry Pie. She promised in her ads that the berries were so cold that you didn't need to put them in the refrigerator, and that would save money on energy, so Mama's Greenberry Pie was a bargain. So advertised that way Mama's pies sold well, and she married and had a family.

Now usually berry pies have a lot of sugar. But sugar is fattening, and ever since Mama's Daddy died she wanted her pies to be healthy as well as green. So instead of sugar, she asked the fairies to come and sprinkle fairy dust all over her pies. The fairies really loved working for Mama, and her children loved all the fairy stories they told. The fairy pies sold well at county fairs, and the fairies helped Mama sell pies by appearing in her ads.

The fairies came from Oklahoma and Texas and Kansas and Nebraska, in the western counties where the Dust Bowl was, and where there was still a lot of dust in the air. Growing up there, the fairies were Republicans because all the people from there are. But fortunately fairies can't vote, and working for Mama they decided they had to go green, and anyway Mama told them their fairy dust had to be green as well as sweet. So the fairies had to make sure their dust was not polluted from all the oil wells in the area, and to support green energy. So they only bought the raw materials for their fairy dust from land with windmills on it. Wind is a big energy source in these Republican counties. And Mama got her wheat from those lands, and from hydrophonic farms grown underneath raised-up, condensed solar energy mirrors, using some of the recycled water and sunlight that leaked through. That way they used the extra land taken up by the solar and wind farms. And they even used some of the radiation from Mike's nuclear power plants. Although radiation leaks are rare, as Mike assured Mama, when they happened the fairies used the fallout to make special fairy dust that glowed and helped with digestion. And if people got sick, at least it would help the surgeons see better what was happening inside their bodies. These ideas sold well in Mama's ads too.

Of course, Republican fairies are red too, and so are many berries. And we know that Greenland was probably founded by Erik the Red. And his son Leif Erikson founded Vinland in America, where grapes were grown. Mama wanted grapes in her pies too for extra flavor. So she asked her son Eric (Eric the Green, that's me) to found a new state in Canada called Newvinland. The red and green grapes grown there were so delicious that Mama's Greenberry Pie became the best selling pies in America, and Mama became a household name from her ads with Eric the Green. Greenberry pie even replaced apple pie as the American symbol. In some of her pie lines, Mama added some whiskey and rye to her American Pie, and even some holly berries to honor Buddy Holly. And all over America people wore green MAGA hats to Make America Green Again. The Trump followers took off their red hats, put on green ones and became Democrats and Greens. Even Marjorey Taylor-Greene went Green and traded in her conspiracy theories for fairy stories. And that's how Mama's Blueberry Pie saved the world.

But it wasn't all good news. The fairies promised that their special strongest fairy dust would help people grow fairy wings. A special line of pies were brought out with this dust. But some people thought they could fly after eating the pie, and they jumped out of windows and died. So Mama had to discontinue this line, and her company was sued for a billion dollars. She could no longer sell the pie to make you high. The fairies had to offer a new line of fairy dust to make up for this loss so Mama wouldn't fire them. So they created dust that came from their own sweet personality. Eating the new pies made people happy. And since the faires were connected to the spirit world, they could comfort the relatives of the dead building-jumpers by offering their mediumship skills to them. Legend has it that these dead would-be winged fairy pie eaters even became fairies themselves and worked for Mama making fairy dust. So America and the world became fairyland too-- happy and full of fairy fairs with fairieswheels all year long.


My UU Band of Writers Essays

Easy Homemade Blueberry Pie recipe

article on fairies in New World Encyclopedia

fairy dust

fairy dust is an idea from the Peter Pan story and was used by Tinker Bell to confer the power of flight