Sign of summer

I ate my first real strawberry of the summer yesterday. This is something I wait the whole year for. Biting into that piece of warm, sweet, ripe fruit that you start to taste as soon as your nose smells it. I wait for the soft bite, the crunch of seeds, the sweet, the juicy spot that ends up on my shirt.

I remember when we didn't eat fruits and veggies that weren't in season because you couldn't buy them out of season. Maybe it's because travel resistent varieties weren't created yet, but when I was a kid we ate strawberries and raspberries and blueberries and cherries and peaches and corn on the cob in the summer, gorging ourselves for the two to three weeks they were ripe and ready. Apples came in September, corn came in August and tomatoes, too. Raspberries were ripe in July, strawberries in mid-June.
Now, we can have strawberries on Christmas if we wanted to buy something that looked like a strawberry but sure doesn't taste or act like a strawberry.
A strawberry should be juicy right in your hand. Trucked strawberries never juice. You can put one on the floor and step on it and it wouldn't juice. Strawberries aren't supposed to make a sound when you slice them, they should sound like slicing soft butter. Off season strawberries sound when you cut them like you're cutting a potato. They might look pretty on top of that cake but they sure don't taste like anything.
So I wait for my berries. I pick them off the plant my very own self, inhaling the aroma of the whole field. I love the experience both ways. I like when I'm in the Upick field all by myself, just me and the birds and I like seeing moms and grandmas bring the kids, passing the quiet, slow experience on to another generation.
That's what we'll do this week when my daughter brings Elizabeth and Adelaide for their first of the summer sleep over. We are going to pick strawberries. We're going to teach Adelaide how it's done. And when we get home, if there are any left in the boxes, I'll make the pie. THE pie.
Stay tuned!