Do you take blueberries?

One can learn a great deal by going away into the wilds of a state like Pennsylvania, where roads and houses and whole towns are swallowed up by trees and hills. One learns, for instance, just how comforting one's spouse can be in anxious situations, such as while driving in the pitch blackness through a thick forest, where creatures of the imagination live in actuality. In such a situation a spouse might seek to reassure one by saying something like, "Here's where I remember every scary movie I ever watched...like the one where a couple drives into a dark, dark forest and is never seen again..."

The spouse quickly learns that the definition of comfort varies greatly among individuals.

One can also learn a great deal from the locals, and from non-locals, such as the couple from New York who stayed at the same B&B as we did. They informed us that bartering is big in New York, and that money is going the way of the typewriter there.

"Like," the woman said, "we know someone who found a good dog walker -- which by the way is a very lucrative business in New York -- and offered to build the dog walker a Web site instead of paying her to walk the dog. Bartering is huge."

This couple had recently ordered, through an admittedly dubious Web site, a blueberry plant that could be grown in one's home and was purported to bear blueberries perpetually. Their idea was that, since they possess no helpful skills that can be bartered for desirable items or services, they could harvest the berries and use them as bartering tools. They envisioned a vast blueberry empire someday, one that would be self-sustaining and would possibly necessitate a move to larger quarters.

Here our B&B host mentioned that she, too, had ordered a blueberry plant. "That was five years ago, and I'm still waiting for it," she said.

This somewhat dampened the couple's enthusiasm, although New Yorkers are not easily discouraged, and they remained confident that we would someday hear of their blueberry empire.

Later while we were antiquing, we realized that the charge cards that define our daily spending were more worthless as currency for buying antiques than missing blueberry plants. We are not accustomed to carrying cash with us, not even change, and we stood helpless before a little garden bench that was calling out to us to take it home. We faced the prospect of a bleak life without its charms, when Joe remembered the bartering.

"We have this rocking chair in the car..." he said to the woman selling the bench.

"No bartering, absolutely!" she said, apparently not up on New York ways.

And so we were forced to purchase the bench in a very primitive manner, by going to the nearby ATM and extracting cold, hard cash and handing it over to the woman.

I guess we won't be ordering any blueberry plants just yet.