I had huckleberry yogurt for breakfast this morning.

To understand why I feel that’s worth writing about, I first need to share this reflection, which I wrote for my school. I called the piece “Souvenirs That Tell a Story (an Ode to the Huckleberry),” after a staff spiritual retreat that featured a souvenir hunt, the final event of our school’s Vital Worship Grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. But I was tempted to call it “Sacramental Yogurt.” Eighteen months—and dozens of yogurt cups—later, I find that title resonates with me even more.

Souvenirs That Tell a Story (an Ode to the Huckleberry)

There’s a container of Tillamook huckleberry yogurt sitting in my refrigerator that I can’t bring myself to eat. If you aren’t familiar with that brand name, Tillamook is a dairy company based in Tillamook, Oregon. It has always held a special place in my heart. My family stopped there 40 years ago on a west coast excursion that took us thousands of miles in a two-toned brown station wagon. And we had friends in Portland who would send us Tillamook cheese gift boxes at Christmas. You can find Tillamook cheese in grocery stores in Michigan. And, just recently, Meijer started carrying their ice cream—which is so good! (I’m not even an ice cream fan.) But sadly, their yummy yogurt hasn’t made its way here. I must travel 1,000+ miles to get it.

Even if Tillamook yogurt would land in Michigan, I doubt we’d see the huckleberry one here.

The huckleberry is a western thing; it’s the state fruit of Idaho and Montana. It’s close to a blueberry, but better. Don’t get me wrong, I love blueberries. My family and I pick buckets and buckets of them each summer, enough to freeze until next summer. And I will remember those days in the berry patch as I bake pies, muffins, and coffee cakes. I will remember the day my friend and I chatted while meandering through the bushes at any number of West Michigan fruit farms. But blueberries don’t tell the story of my childhood and teenage years. They don’t tell the story of my love for mountains. Huckleberries do.

I was born and raised in South Dakota. Almost every summer, my family would travel to the beautiful Black Hills on the west side of the state. For years, I was either a camper or a counselor at a camp near Keystone, SD, a prototypical tourist town just down the road from Mount Rushmore. In Keystone, there was a taffy shop. (Every tourist town has the requisite taffy shop.) And every year, I would buy huckleberry taffy there. Now, here’s the interesting thing. I didn’t love that taffy. I found it way too sweet. But that didn’t matter. The fact that I could buy huckleberry taffy there meant I was back where huckleberry treats were sold. Back in the Hills. Back in a place I loved.

In my many trips out west since then, I’ve discovered other huckleberry treats that do taste good— chocolates, lemonade, jam, syrup. And yes, my favorite yogurt. We bought enough of it out west in July to fill our small cooler. I knew it wouldn’t last long. But for five weeks, when I opened the fridge door, it reminded me of our trip. I see the mountain peaks along the Beartooth Highway. I smell the pine trees on the way up to Black Elk Peak. I hear the elk bellowing in Shell Canyon. I laugh at the thought of marmots everywhere—and specifically the marmot that ran right in front of our car and then turned and gave us the stink eye after that close call. (He had the right to be mad. Of the two of us, I’m not the one who truly belongs at 10,000 feet.) Most of all, I marvel at God’s beautiful world, and I thank him for it.

Particularly interesting is that I’m savoring this at the same time my fridge is overflowing with fresh local fruit. In mid-July, I experienced a fruit trifecta one night in Coopersville: fresh cherries, blueberries, and peaches on the same day. Since then, we’ve added nectarines, plums, and melon. I’ll admit it, if I’d put any one of those fresh Michigan fruits in a bowl of any brand of vanilla yogurt, it would probably taste better than the huckleberry yogurt I bought in a grocery store at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains a month ago. But it wouldn’t taste like memories.

In the last school newsletter, we shared a picture from the “souvenir hunt” at our staff retreat in June. Did you zoom in on the picture and look at those items (bookmark, bowl, chocolate, mini whisk, Michigan magnet, floral book clips, panda pen, sunset sticker, bag trail mix, old Jimmy John’s bread) and wonder who picked what? Did you wonder about the stories behind those items, the memories and experiences and feelings they represented? Our June 2022 spiritual retreat also involved a guessing game about favorite beautiful places. I designed those bookend worship grant activities because it’s good for us to take time to laugh and play together. And as I was planning this year’s retreat, it made me smile to think about my colleagues ducking in and out of the shops in downtown Holland trying to spend $4—and to keep others from seeing them. But it’s really all about building relationships.

We’re a small staff. We see each other every day during the week. Some of us have known each other for almost twenty years. But as well as we know each other, there’s always more to learn. If you say to someone, “Tell me about yourself,” you will probably get a list of adjectives or accomplishments. If you ask, “How was your summer?”, you might hear about a place or an event. But if you give time and space so that a group of people can share objects that hold meaning for them, you will hear stories of their journeys.

After we shared, our guest speaker, Rev. Sue Rozeboom, talked about some souvenirs of the journey too: the things in Scripture that tell the story of Scripture. She paged through the Bible and mentioned all the references to water, from the separating of the waters at creation in Genesis 1 to the River of Life at the end of Revelation. And then she noted all the references to food, specifically to bread. Hopefully you can see where this was leading. Water and bread point us to Living Water (John 4) and Bread of Life (John 6), to the person and work of Jesus Christ. He gave us “sacred souvenirs,” as I like to think of them: bread and wine, that we might come together around the table and take, eat, and remember.

Note the come together part. It’s important. The huckleberry yogurt reminds me of being with my family out west. It reminds me of being with my friends at camp. It reminds me of all that has happened and all the people I’ve met in the 30 years between. It reminds me that my souvenirs are not just about me. I haven’t traveled alone. I am never alone. So yes, as strange as it sounds, that cup of just-past-the-“best by”-date yogurt reminds me of God’s presence and faithfulness. Like every souvenir we collect along the journey, it is an invitation to taste and see that the Lord is good.

What souvenirs—from this summer, past summers, or any time—have you kept? Are they in your refrigerator too? On your walls or bookshelves? Or simply treasured in your heart? Do they remind you of a trip, an event, a friend, a good story that’s fun to tell? Do they remind you of God’s story and his faithfulness to all generations?

I love to tell the story, for those who know it best

seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.

And when in scenes of glory I sing the new, new song, ‘

twill be the old, old story that I have loved so long.

But a year and a half later, I have to wonder. Do I love my souvenirs that tell the story more than the story itself?

The yogurt cup that inspired my reflection was carefully and lovingly packed away in a cooler to survive the 1,300 miles from Wyoming to Michigan. About a dozen made the trip. Only eleven were eaten. I couldn’t say goodbye to that last one. It reminded me of mountains and big skies and yes, marmots. But many souvenirs lose their coveted places on walls, mantles, and refrigerator doors. We pack them up and put them away. We make room for new treasured memories, as we should. Or we just move on to the regular stuff of regular life. That one last huckleberry yogurt got pushed to the very back of the fridge because we needed milk, eggs, and bread. I eventually forgot about the thing I was so happy to have. I forgot about the thing I was supposed to eat.

My husband and I spent eight glorious weeks in the mountains of Montana and Wyoming this fall. I discovered even more huckleberry delights. Among the twenty-three (Yes, twenty-three!) varieties of Tillamook ice cream we found in the tiny town of Thayne, Wyoming, was a container of, you guessed it, huckleberry. (It made for great milkshakes.) And there’s a truck stop outside Missoula that sells giant huckleberry cream cheese cinnamon rolls. But the yogurt still had my heart. I made a beeline for the dairy case in the first grocery store we found it. (That would be Billings. Gillette had Tillamook yogurt, but not huckleberry) and started calculating how many cups we could bring home this time to avoid past regret. Why didn’t we bring a bigger cooler? We’ll run out too soon!

I wonder if I kept that cup of July 2023 yogurt because I was savoring a memory or because I was fearing loss. But there was still loss. Instead of allowing me to taste the west and celebrate its goodness, that yogurt surely became more science experiment than breakfast under that sealed lid. No one in my family wanted to open it and find out what very old yogurt looked like—or smelled like. I certainly didn’t want to be left with that memory. I had a feeling it would smell like present regret.

An eight-week sabbatical, as opposed to our usual one-week vacation, allowed us to truly live in the mountains instead of just visiting them. Tillamook huckleberry yogurt was my daily choice for breakfast for two full months. It became no less special just because it was ordinary. Every morning it was a joy to take and eat.

We did bring a bigger cooler out west this year, and we filled it up our last day in Missoula. Over the last few weeks, the cups of yogurt have slowly disappeared from the bottom shelf of the fridge. But I have not felt it as loss.

I had the last huckleberry yogurt for breakfast this morning . . . and savored the moment I allowed a souvenir to be received as food.