Strawberry Fields Forever

As a kid, my mental marker for summer was strawberries. Creeping along the dusty rows in my grandparents' garden, trying not to get dirt in my sandals, peering between the wide green leaves for red berries, hoping that the turtles hadn't gotten a taste of the biggest ones before I could pick them. Brushing them clean and then biting into them, sun warmed and still a little gritty, but also delicious. I couldn't be trusted to help harvest without eating over half of what I picked like a scarlet version of Blueberries for Sal, so I was left to it and my grandma would gather her own colander full to make strawberry shortcake with later.

strawberry shortcake from a local restaurant, made with piecrust (like my grandma) and real whipped cream (she always used cool whip, which I always politely declined)

My love of strawberries is shared by only one of my children, unsurprisingly born of the pregnancy during which I consumed a ridiculous amount of cherries (which I did not like before or since). She loves all berries, but chooses strawberries first, and the boys in the house leave us to our enjoyment of them (we are more than happy to eat their share). So we eat them plain, or dipped in sugar (or chocolate). We usually get them from local farmers markets, as I have accepted my natural societal position as a forager (rather than a gardener) but she did keep up with watering a strawberry plant well enough last year to get a few berries off it before the summer heat shriveled it to a barren crisp.

In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about finding wild strawberries as a child, harvesting the berries and also clearing spaces for the runners to put down roots. I love that image of a little one in harmony with nature. Even in the vigilantly straight rows of my own childhood, there were still errant runners, determined to cross over and greet their siblings across the way, and slow box turtles, infiltrating the garden disguised as innocent rocks.

Now, strawberries remind me of comfortable simplicity, of warm sun and cool water, and of the need to put down roots in the place that feels most natural, even if it's outside the order placed upon me by someone else. We all find comfort in different places, which is just as well because otherwise we'd all be piled up in the same hammock, and learning to pursue my own small delights has been a journey that I've very much benefitted from.

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