Sunday Story: Strawberry Sins
No recipe today. Instead, a story about berry picking in my youth.
Ignore the calendar and temperature. Summer arrives with strawberries. At least it used to.
Long before giant, white-on-the-inside California berries made themselves at home in Canadian grocery stores, strawberries were an annual, limited-time event. According to my mother, they always arrived between June 20 and 25th, like clockwork. You had two, maybe three berry-stained weeks to pick, preserve, and enjoy. Then they were gone, replaced by the next seasonal fruit.
We rarely ate strawberries from the grocery store. Instead, we drove to the pick-your-own farm. It seemed a world away but was no more than 15 minutes outside of town. We’d go early in the morning before the sun was too hot. Never an early riser, I hauled myself out of bed almost willingly, knowing there would be berries after breakfast.
Before we left, Mom carefully calculated how many berries she’d need. She applied a sophisticated algorithm involving freezer space, cash on hand, upcoming events, and estimated physical stamina. “Thirty-six quarts!” she’d say. Or some other number that sounded impossibly big, yet was never big enough. She’d then head to the basement and count out the required number of baskets from the stack that lived beneath the fuse box. Some of the baskets were older than me. They were used again and again until their bottoms dissolved with berry juice or their handles snapped.
At the strawberry farm, stained baskets in hand, Mom delivered the Don’t-Eat-the-Berries schpeel.
“Why not?” I asked, looking at the endless rows of berries. Who would notice?
“It’s stealing.” Mom’s voice was clipped and sharp. End of discussion.
The farmer’s helpers escorted us to our rows. We were spread out so the plants wouldn’t be over-picked. We set the baskets on the ground, dropped to our knees and began. I parted the leaves in search of the brightest, plumpest berries. Safely out of my mother’s sight, I popped the occasional berry into my mouth. Just to be sure they were worthy.
When our baskets threatened to explode, and our fingers were stained bright pink, we helped load our harvest into the trunk. Despite my mid-row gorging, I’d sneak one or two more when I thought Mom wasn’t looking.
The car was now so hot, the vinyl seats burned our bare legs. Rocking from side to side until the vinyl no longer stung, we rolled down the windows and stuck our faces into the cool air as Mom drove the long, country roads home. We thought only of the wind whipping through our hair, as the warm vinyl quietly bonded to our bare legs. Back home, I pried my thighs free, stoically accepting the sting as punishment for my theft.
Rubbing the back of my legs, I waddled to the kitchen where Mom had already begun working. Before dinner, she would sort, hull, and process hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of berries. The beautiful ones we ate. The small ones she froze. The damaged ones were salvaged — sliced up for shortcake or mashed into jam.
Mom sorted and hulled and swatted my hands away. I wanted to stop gorging on summer berries, but couldn’t. Not until the dreaded but inevitable Strawberry Stomach Ache set in.
“That’ll teach you,” Mom said without a hint of her usual compassion.
It didn’t.
Today, I am attempting to grow my own strawberries. Yet again. A few years ago, I bought an ever-bearing seedling in the belief I would have berries from June to September. I had hoped their fruit would be as sweet and red and flavourful as the strawberries of my childhood. I may never know. Each year, the plants flower and produce a handful of berries. And just as they are on the verge of ripening, the berries disappear. Gobbled by greedy squirrels or birds or rabbits. Overnight, my small but promising strawberry harvest vanishes, signalling the start of a new seasonal cycle — karmic retribution for the strawberry sins of my youth.