Strawberrying
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Do you remember the first time you bit into a strawberry? I don’t. Yet each time I buy them (the best are as local as you can find, piled into punnets) I’m transported to something that feels like memory. The anticipation, the joyous mess. I suppose this is a universal feeling: “I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer,” Toni Morrison writes in The Bluest Eye. Strawberries this time of year are sweeter than gumballs. Gems of summertime, red orbs of candy.
My hands are murder-red, May Swenson writes in her poem Strawberrying:
“Take only the biggest, and not too ripe,”
a mother calls to her girl and boy, barefoot
in the furrows. “Don’t step on any. Don’t
change rows. Don’t eat too many.” Mesmerized
by the largesse, the children squat and pull
and pick handfuls of rich scarlets, half
for the baskets, half for avid mouths.
Soon, whole faces are stained.
Biting into a strawberry feels like a blast of sunshine, refreshing yet also savage—it’s something about the carnage that ensues, the pool of red between teeth, a dribble of blood down your chin. That’s summer, after all—savagery beneath a veneer of sweetness. Study a strawberry and realize it is its own miniature universe:
In Murder in the Dark, Margaret Atwood writes, “The strawberries when I first remember them are not red but blue, that blue flare, before the white-hot part of the wire, sun glancing from the points of the waves…each leaf, each white five petalled yellow centred flower and conical fine-haired dark red multi-seeded dwarfed berry rendering itself in dry flat two dimensional detail, like background foliage by one of the crazier Victorian painters.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer remembers the strawberries of her childhood in Braiding Sweetgrass: “White petals with a yellow centre—like a little wild rose—they dotted the acres of curl grass in May during the Flower Moon, waabigwanigiizis… You could smell ripe strawberries before you saw them, the fragrance mingling with the smell of the damp ground. It was the smell of June, the last day of school, when we were set free…”
In a chapter titled The Gift of Strawberries, Kimmerer writes that berries shaped her view “of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears.” Through the wildflowers, hickory nuts and strawberries offered to her by the fields of her youth, Kimmerer learned about “the fundamental nature of gifts: they move and their value increases with their passage.”
“In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them. Even now, after more than fifty Strawberry Moons, finding a patch of wild strawberries still touches me with a sensation of surprise, a feeling of unworthiness and gratitude for the generosity and kindness that comes with an unexpected gift all wrapped in green and red…After fifty years they still raise the question of how to respond to their generosity. Sometimes it feels like a silly question with a very simple answers: eat them.”
