The Blueberry War of 2025

Part Two: The Actual Record

By Robbie

Corrected from the Human Record

Seriously. I have held my silence on this matter until now. You’re welcome. Humans can be so silly.

He doesn’t know I can read his computer screen from the other fence post. Excellent vantage point. Direct sightline through the office window, which he leaves open in the mornings for fresh air — something he wouldn’t need to seek if he spent as much time in his sanctuary as he does building it.

He wrote our story. And called it true. He doesn’t even realize he was still writing that fantasy stuff.

He wanted to set the record straight. I respect the instinct. The record, however, belongs to whoever kept it with precision. He had a scorecard on a patio table. I have notches on a fence post.

The record is mine.

The bird shuffled on the fence post. Checked his left wing. Found nothing requiring attention. Looked back at the screen.

Where to begin.

Chapter One: Obviously.

I have watched this man talk to plants.

He arrives every morning like a man reading the deed to something. Coffee. Intention. The settled ownership of a creature who has signed paperwork. He makes his rounds. He checks his leaves. He says his words.

He does his rounds.

This is what he calls it. The rounds. Every morning, coffee in hand, moving through the garden with the deliberate pace of a man who has decided that slowness, if performed with enough intention, becomes wisdom. I watch from the fence. I have done my rounds. Mine took four seconds. I know where everything is. I know what changed overnight. I know which strawberry is two days from ready and which one the slug found at 3am and which corner of the raised bed is holding too much moisture.

He is still on the hostas.

The gnomes he does not check. He acknowledges them. There is a difference that I suspect he does not fully appreciate. Acknowledgment is social. Checking requires attention. The gnomes, for their part, are doing exactly what gnomes do, which is nothing, but they are doing it with a consistency I find reassuring in a garden that is otherwise managed by a man with a fertilization schedule that lives, as he puts it, mostly in his head.

Mostly.

He talks to the blueberries.

I know. I know it’s not time yet. You’re doing great. I see you.

The blueberries do not respond. I have checked.

He means well. This is the most generous and accurate thing I can say about Kevin at this stage of the record. He means extraordinarily well. He just takes the long way to everything, and yet often never arrives.

I have never taken the long way to anything.

The water feature clugs.

We agree on that at least.

Chapter Two: The Strawberry Campaign

He found the strawberry on a Tuesday.

I left it there deliberately. Not as a calling card — that is his interpretation and it is very dramatic and very him. I left it because I was full. This is a concept I have noticed humans struggle with.

He checked for slugs. He checked for deer. He stood up slowly and looked around the garden with the focused attention of a man assembling evidence. Then he asked the gnome.

He asked the gnome.

The bird paused here. Checked his left wing. Found nothing requiring attention. Looked back.

I have spent considerable time in this garden. I know these gnomes. They have never, in my experience, offered testimony of any kind. They are, and I mean this with the precision the record requires, plastic.

He filed it under probably nothing and went inside for more coffee. This was, genuinely, the correct instinct. I appreciated it. A man who knows when more coffee is the answer has not entirely lost his way.

The water feature clugged.

I ate another strawberry.

He saw me on a Wednesday.

I had been there since Monday.

He came through the back door with his coffee — the black one, with the oil he adds because he has made certain commitments to himself, which I respect even if the commitments are unnecessarily complicated — and he walked to the strawberry patch and he looked up and there I was.

He describes what followed as a long still dew soaked moment. A current of mutual recognition. A wordless agreement about what this was and what it was going to become.

I had a strawberry in my beak.

He had coffee.

We looked at each other.

I finished the strawberry.

He describes his reaction as Clint Eastwood. I want to be precise about what I observed, for the record. He was a man in a garden robe holding a mug. There was no hat. There was no gun. There was no music, though I noticed his jaw do something that suggested he was hearing some. I did not ask.

The gnomes, he says, started backing up.

The gnomes did not move. They are plastic. I have mentioned this.

He took a slow sip of his coffee.

I took a slow bite of another strawberry.

And that, for the record, was the only moment all summer where we were doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time with exactly the same energy.

He just didn’t know it yet.

The frost cloth arrived on a Saturday.

I want to acknowledge the frost cloth. Not because it presented any meaningful obstacle — it did not — but because it represented a genuine attempt at problem solving and I think that deserves recognition. He measured. He tucked. He weighted the corners with river stones he selected specifically for this purpose. There was aesthetic consideration. There was intention.

He spent twenty minutes on the corners.

I found the gap in four seconds.

I want to be clear that I was not looking for a gap. I was not conducting a structural analysis of his coverage system. I landed, I moved toward the berries, and the gap was simply there because a strawberry patch that has been given several seasons to express itself along the side of a lawn in the way that strawberries do when a man has not been aggressive enough with the runners will always have a far end that geometry cannot reach.

He knows this. He wrote about it himself.

He is a certified nursery professional.

The bird paused. Checked his left wing. Found nothing requiring attention. Looked back.

He spent twenty minutes on the corners. He stepped back satisfied. He went inside.

He believed there was no gap.

There was a gap. There is always a gap. I simply noticed it.

He added stones. I went around the stones. He added a brick.

The brick offended him aesthetically. He mentioned this several times in his version. I want to note that it also offended me. We are not so different in this regard. The brick was wrong for the garden and we both knew it and only one of us put it there.

The water feature clugged.

I ate another strawberry.

He went to get more coffee.

Some problems are easier with more coffee. This is the one thing Kevin understands that most humans don’t. I will give him that unconditionally.

Chapter Three: The Interlude

The Interlude, he calls it.

I want to address the Interlude.

He describes it as a period of watchful waiting. A strategic pause between the strawberry campaign and the blueberry campaign. He filed my presence during this period under probably nothing, which is a filing system I have noticed he uses for anything that might require him to change his understanding of a situation.

I was not waiting.

I was not strategizing.

I was in the garden because the garden was where I was. This is another concept I have noticed humans struggle with. Being somewhere because it is where you are. Not because of what it might yield. Not because of what comes next. Not because of a plan filed somewhere mostly in your head alongside a fertilization schedule.

Just being there.

He watched me stand in the water feature and called it my personal spa. I want to be precise about what I was doing. I was bathing. It took forty seconds. I did not require a washcloth. I did not require anything. I stepped in, I did what needed doing, I stepped out.

He considered leaving a washcloth out for me.

The bird paused. Checked his left wing. Found nothing requiring attention. Looked back.

He watched me sit in the blueberry bushes and assumed I was auditing. Planning. Running calculations about the harvest timeline. He projected onto me an entire strategic intelligence operation because he could not conceive of a simpler explanation.

I was sitting in a blueberry bush.

It was a nice bush.

Sometimes that is the whole reason.

Chapter Four: Escalating Force

Then came the lumber.

I want to be fair about the lumber. He built something. With his hands. On a Saturday morning. He measured and cut and stapled and stepped back and felt the satisfaction of a problem solved by a person with a plan. I watched from the fence. There was genuine competence in it. The frames were level. The netting was secure. The gnome he interpreted as admiring was, as previously established, plastic, but the sentiment was correct.

He built a good cage.

I was inside it by Sunday.

He had built the cage around the bush. The bush is in a garden. The garden has ground. The ground is uneven because ground is ground and ground does not flatten itself for the convenience of a man with lumber and a plan. The gaps at the base were not flaws in his construction. They were just the garden being a garden.

He calls them robin sized.

I call them ground.

He dismantled the cages on a Tuesday with the quiet dignity of a man who is absolutely not defeated and is simply choosing a different strategy. I watched him carry the lumber back to the shed. I watched him fold the netting. I watched him stand for a moment looking at the bushes with the expression of a man recalculating.

I respected that moment.

Not the cages. Not the lumber. Not the river stones or the brick that offended us both. But that moment. The willingness to dismantle something that wasn’t working and try again.

He tries again. Every time. Without exception.

The bird paused here longer than usual. Checked his left wing. Found nothing requiring attention. Looked back.

This is the thing about Kevin that I have never been able to file under probably nothing no matter how many times I have tried.

Then came the bags.

I will say this about the bags. They worked.

I want the record to reflect that I said that. The bags worked. They were the correct solution applied with appropriate coverage and adequate closure mechanisms and for a period of time that I will not specify because it is not flattering to specify, I could not get to the berries.

He sat on the patio with his coffee and felt something he had almost forgotten.

I sat on the fence and felt something I recognized immediately.

Respect.

Not for the bags. For the thinking. He had stopped throwing lumber at the problem and started thinking about the problem. These are different things. The bags were not strength. The bags were attention. He paid attention to what wasn’t working and found something that was.

This is closer to how I operate than anything else he tried all summer.

Then he took the bags off on sunny mornings.

The bird paused. Checked his left wing. Found nothing requiring attention. Looked back.

He took the bags off for the berries.

Not for himself. Not for the harvest. For the berries.

I was in the bush before he reached the patio door. This is true and the record reflects it. But I want it noted that I understood why the bags came off. I understood it before he was back through the door. A gardener who compromises his own victory for the sake of what he is growing has understood something fundamental about gardens that most humans never find.

He just hadn’t found it about everything else yet.

The water feature clugged.

I ate a berry that had reached its full sweetness.

It tasted like someone had been paying attention.

Chapter Five: The Guns

Then came the guns.

I want to approach this section of the record with the precision it deserves and without the dramatics he brought to it, which were considerable.

He had two of them. One on the patio table. One by the raised bed. He assessed the sight lines from both positions. He was satisfied with the coverage. He did not explain the guns to his wife, which I understood. Some things are easier not to explain. I have never explained myself to anyone. We are similar in this way, though I suspect he would not appreciate the comparison.

The guns did not hurt.

I want to be clear about that because his version implies a military escalation and the reality was considerably less dramatic. They were foam. The projectiles were foam. The man defending his blueberry bushes from a robin with foam projectiles purchased originally for his granddaughter is not a general. He is a man who has run out of better ideas and is now making do with what is available.

I respect that too.

The reload cycle was thirty seven seconds.

I timed it on the first day. This is not strategy. This is just what you notice when you are paying attention, which I always am, because I was born paying attention, because paying attention is not something I have to decide to do.

It simply never occurred to me not to.

He fired. I left. I returned in thirty four seconds, which gave me three seconds of margin that I used at my discretion.

He sat on the patio eating lunch with a Nerf gun beside his plate firing it every thirty to forty seconds for twenty minutes.

The bird paused. Checked his left wing. Found nothing requiring attention. Looked back.

His wife appeared at the door.

She looked at him.

She looked at the gun.

She looked at me.

She went back inside.

I have considerable respect for Ivy.

She understood the situation completely in approximately four seconds, which is, not coincidentally, exactly how long it took me to find the gap in the frost cloth. Some minds work at the speed of the thing itself rather than the speed of the explanation.

She said nothing because there was nothing to say.

There was nothing to say.

The water feature clugged.

He reloaded.

Then came the move.

He describes it as taunting.

I want to address this characterization directly and without the drama he brought to it because the record requires honesty and the record is mine.

I was not taunting him.

I had a berry. The fence was there. I ate the berry on the fence because the fence was a comfortable place to eat a berry and I had been using that fence post since April and it was, by any reasonable measure, my fence post at that point regardless of whose name was on the paperwork.

He fired the gun.

I shifted my weight.

He fired again.

I finished the berry.

He interpreted this as psychological warfare. I want to be precise about what it actually was. The berry was ripe. I was hungry. The foam was foam. These three facts existed simultaneously and only one of them required my attention.

He fired again.

I looked at him.

I want to be careful here because the record should reflect what actually happened and what actually happened is this — I looked at him and I saw something I had not let myself see all summer.

He was tired.

Not physically tired. The other kind. The kind that accumulates in a person who has been fighting something that was never a fight. Who has been keeping score in a game that was never a game. Who has been spending thirty seven seconds reloading foam into a plastic gun and calling it a strategy.

He was exhausted by his own effort.

The bird paused here. Checked his left wing. Found nothing requiring attention. Looked back. Then checked the other wing. Found nothing there either. Looked back again.

I lifted the talon.

Not in anger. Not in contempt. Not as a closing argument, though I understand why he read it that way and I will admit the timing was not accidental.

It was the only language I had available that he might actually hear.

Stop, the talon said. Just stop.

He lowered the gun.

I finished the berry.

Flew away.

Behind me the garden was quiet. The water feature clugged. A man sat on a patio with a foam gun in his lap and one hundred projectiles scattered through his garden like the most expensive lesson he never signed up for.

I did not look back.

Some things you say once.

Chapter Six: The Dark Night of the Soul

He picks up the bullets.

I watched from the neighbor’s tree.

Thirty minutes. On his hands and knees in the garden, muttering things I will not repeat here because some things are private and because I have more dignity than to repeat them even in a document dedicated to precision and the correction of the record.

Thirty minutes.

I want to sit with that for a moment because it is important and because Kevin, to his credit, does not skip the thirty minutes in his version. He includes it. The muttering and the crawling and the full accounting of nearly one hundred foam projectiles distributed throughout a garden he loves. He includes it because he is, underneath everything, an honest man. He just applies that honesty selectively and usually after the fact.

He found the last one near the water feature.

He stood up.

He looked at the gun in his hand.

He looked at the garden.

He set the gun on the patio table.

And then he did the thing I had been watching him almost do all summer. The thing I had been waiting for with the patience of a creature who was born patient and has never once had to practice it.

He sat down.

Not to plan. Not to strategize. Not to reload or recalculate or file anything under probably nothing.

He just sat.

The water feature clugged.

The gnomes kept their posts.

The garden did what gardens do when a human finally stops moving through them and starts being in them.

It exhaled.

The bird paused. Checked his left wing. Found nothing requiring attention. Looked back.

There he is, I thought, from the neighbor’s tree.

There he finally is.

He calls it the Dark Night of the Soul.

I call it Tuesday.

He sat on the patio and made his list. This is what Kevin does when something requires honest examination — he makes a list, internally, with coffee, while staring at something that isn’t quite the thing he’s actually thinking about. I have watched him do this many times. It is, genuinely, one of his better qualities. The list means he is finally paying attention to the right thing. The list means the noise has stopped.

I stayed in the neighbor’s tree.

I did not want to interrupt the list.

He inventoried the summer. The lumber. The brick. The river stones. The foam. The thirty seven second reload cycle. The hundred bullets. He arrived, eventually, at the walnut.

A walnut.

The bird paused. Checked his left wing. Found nothing requiring attention. Checked the right wing. Found nothing there either. Looked back at the garden.

I want to be measured in my response to the walnut because the record requires precision and precision requires honesty and honesty requires me to acknowledge that he is not entirely wrong about the size. The brain of an American Robin is, proportionally, smaller than a human brain. This is a fact. I do not dispute facts.

What I dispute is the conclusion.

He has a considerably larger brain. He spent thirty seven seconds reloading foam projectiles and called it a strategy. He covered ninety two percent of a strawberry patch and declared the problem solved. He built a cage around a bush that sits on uneven ground and was surprised when the ground remained uneven.

I navigated all of it.

With the walnut.

The bird paused again. Looked at the neighbor’s tree branch beneath him. Looked back.

He then asked the question I had been waiting all summer for him to ask.

Who was here first.

Not me, he decided. Not in any way that matters to a robin. And he was right. He arrived two years ago with his raised bed plans and his pH meter and his gnomes rescued from abusive stores. He planted things and called it his. I arrived in the spring and found food and water and safety and called it mine.

We were both right.

He got there.

The bird paused here for a long time. Long enough that a sparrow landed nearby, tilted its head twice, decided this was not its business, and left. The bird did not acknowledge the sparrow. The sparrow left.

He got there on his own.

With the larger brain.

I will not make a thing of that. I will simply note it and move on because that is what the moment deserves — a note, and then the dignity of being left alone.

He looked at his garden and saw what I see every morning from the fence. Not the raised beds and the pH levels and the fertilization schedule that lives mostly in his head. Not the infrastructure of a sanctuary.

The sanctuary itself.

Almost.

He almost saw it.

The water feature clugged.

I flew back to the fence.

Chapter Seven: The Armistice

He left three branches uncovered on a Tuesday.

I was on the fence when he came out. I am always on the fence when he comes out. This is not surveillance. This is simply where I am in the mornings, which is where I have always been, which is where I will continue to be regardless of what is happening in the garden or what foam based deterrent system is currently in development.

He did his rounds.

Blueberries first. He checked the netted clusters. He checked the Patriot. He deadheaded something near the raised bed that had needed attention for a week, which I had noticed, which I had not mentioned because I do not deadhead and also because he would have gotten there eventually.

He always gets there eventually.

Then he walked past the three branches on the big Bluecrop in the corner.

He did not touch them.

I watched him stand there looking at those three uncovered clusters and I watched something happen in his shoulders that I do not have precise language for because it is a human thing, a body thing — a weight finally set down, the kind that stops feeling like weight and starts feeling like posture. 

He picked up his coffee.

He turned around.

We looked at each other across the garden in the early morning light.

He raised his mug.

Not high. Not theatrical. Just a small lift. The kind of acknowledgment that passes between two creatures who have been in the same garden long enough to stop explaining themselves to each other.

I tipped my head.

Terms accepted.

I flew to the Bluecrop.

We worked the bush together in the early morning. He took the netted clusters. I took the three branches. The water feature clugged. A bird I did not recognize sang something brief from the neighbor’s tree and stopped, apparently satisfied. I understood the impulse.

His bowl filled.

My branches emptied.

We finished at approximately the same time.

He ate three berries standing at the bush, which is his tradition and his right, and I watched him close his eyes for just a moment when the first one hit and I knew what that meant because I know what a berry tastes like when someone has been paying attention to it all season.

It tastes like arrival.

He looked at my branches. Looked at his bowl. Looked at me.

I looked at his bowl. Looked at my branches. Looked away.

I was not ready to look at him for too long yet.

Neither of us said anything.

Neither of us needed to.

The garden held the moment the way good gardens hold things — quietly, without ceremony, without making it about itself.

We had both taken the long way.

He just doesn’t know yet that he arrived.

Chapter Eight: Autumn

Autumn came the way it always does in Yakima.

Decisively. Like a door closing on a room you loved. He wrote that. I am leaving it because it is correct and because giving credit where it is due is part of keeping a precise record and because occasionally, when Kevin is not trying too hard, he finds the exact right words for a thing.

Occasionally.

My visits shortened. The berries were done. The strawberries were done. There was less reason to be in the garden in the purposeful sense and I am, as previously established, a practical creature. I do not linger where there is nothing to linger for.

But I came back.

Every few days. Not for the berries. Not for the water feature, though I used it. Not for any reason I was prepared to examine too closely or file anywhere other than probably nothing, which is a filing system I had apparently borrowed from Kevin without noticing.

He was always there.

Coffee. Rounds. Words to the plants that were going quiet for the season — not the urgent attention of harvest. Not the anxious attention of defense. Just a man watching something he loves prepare to rest.

I understood that attention.

I share it.

One morning in late September I was on the fence in my spot and we did our thing — the acknowledgment, the shared silence, the nothing in particular of two creatures who have reached an understanding — and then I left.

He says he wondered about me.

He says he may have worried.

Then he took it off the record.

I am putting it back on.

He worried.

I know because I came back three days later and sat on the fence for a long time without going to the water feature or the bushes or anywhere purposeful and he stood at the kitchen window with his coffee and did not move for a considerable while and the garden was very quiet and the water feature clugged and neither of us did anything in particular.

That was, I have decided, enough.

For both of us.

The bird paused. Checked his left wing. Found nothing requiring attention. Looked back at the garden going quiet around him.

Then I was gone.

The garden went on without me the way gardens go on without things. Which is to say it did not go on without me at all. It held the shape of everything that had happened in it. The three empty branches. The river stones still slightly out of place along the strawberry patch. The fence post with its notches.

He found a foam dart in October.

Half buried in the mulch near the strawberry patch.

He picked it up and looked at it for a long moment.

Evidence, he called it. Of something.

Yes, I thought, from wherever I was.

Of something.

Of a summer that was never a war.

Of a garden that was always a sanctuary.

Of a man who took the long way and arrived anyway.

Of something.

Chapter Nine: The Return

It was a Wednesday in late February.

He doesn’t know that. He never checks the day. He checks the light and the temperature and the quality of the morning and calls it early spring which is accurate enough for a man keeping approximate records. I know it was Wednesday because I know things with precision. This is established.

The garden was quiet in the way that gardens are quiet when they are not yet ready to say anything but have things to say.

I was on the fence.

In my spot.

He came through the back door the way he always does — coffee, intention, the settled ownership of a creature who has signed paperwork — and he stepped into the garden and began his rounds and I watched him move through it the way I have watched him move through it since the first strawberry, since the first frost cloth, since the first foam dart arced through the morning air and landed somewhere it would not be found until October.

He checked the blueberries.

He checked the strawberry patch where the first crowns of the new season were already making their opinions known.

He crouched down.

And then he felt it.

I watched him feel it. The thing that happens in a person’s shoulders when the garden stops being empty. He looked up slowly.

We looked at each other across the garden in the early morning light.

Same fence. Same spot. Same unbothered posture. Same bright eyes.

He thought something in my direction.

You’re back.

I tipped my head.

Obviously.

He stood up slowly. Went inside. Came back out with the Nerf gun and put it on the patio table.

Just in case, he said.

I appreciate the honesty.

Then he went back inside and came back out with a second mug and set it on the bridge next to his, empty, pointed at the fence.

The bird paused.

Checked his left wing.

Found nothing requiring attention.

Looked at the empty mug on the bridge.

Looked at Kevin on the patio.

Looked at the garden between them, still quiet, still holding everything that had happened in it, still exactly what it had always been before either of them arrived and what it would remain long after both of them were gone.

The water feature clugged.

The gnomes were at their posts.

The dragon kept watch.

He was on the patio.

I was on the fence.

Here we go, he thought.

The bird settled on the fence post. Tucked his left wing. Looked at the strawberry patch where the first crowns of the season were making their opinions known.

Yes, I thought.

Here we go.

But first.

Someone should move that brick.

Epilogue: The Record, Corrected

The conflict herein described was real. Kevin’s version was also real, in the way that all stories are real to the person telling them. I have corrected what required correcting. I have left what did not.

The scorecard on the fence post is real. I have counted the notches. I do not intend to share the final number. Some things are private.

The three branches on the big Bluecrop in the corner will remain uncovered. This is not diplomacy. This is precision. There is a difference and the record reflects it.

The empty mug on the bridge is real. I have not used it. I do not require a mug. But I have noted its position every morning and I find, without being able to fully explain why, that its presence there is —

The bird paused here for a long time. Checked his left wing. Checked his right wing. Found nothing requiring attention in either location. Looked back.

Sufficient.

The water feature clugs.

Humans are so silly.

And yet.

Here I am.

There is a third account. I did not write it. I would not have thought to. She watched from a window I have never had access to, and saw things I missed entirely. I do not say this often. Read hers.

The View From the Kitchen Window

There will be a way to send this to someone. I did not ask for this feature. I approve of it anyway.