Strawberries

spring with friends

One August night, almost 14 years ago on the Island of Nantucket I sat with Tracy, her father Richard, sister Kelly and friends, Aveen, Terry and Ann. As birds sang their forever song and a soft breeze came in through the open windows, rustling curtains and bringing along with the sea salt the scent of lavender from the bushes which surrounded her home we waited, awake and watching. It was an ordinary spectacular Nantucket night; moonlight and candles, the low roar of crickets and frogs, blankets wrapped round our shoulders, wine glasses on nightstands. Every 30 minutes or so, Tracy would move a bit and one of us would rise from our mattress on the floor and move a pillow to the left or right. We would take her arms and lift them slowly up, first to the ceiling and then down to the other side of the bed and her thin body would follow. Quiet, calm, peace, for a moment. We would search her face and whisper “better?’ If the cricket chatter had ebbed we could hear her breathe back ‘yes.’ As the sun began to light up the wild roses in the front of the grey shingled house and the sky turned from an opaque steel grey to the softest transparent light blue-yellow, Tracy’s soul left her body and quietly continued on it’s journey.

A few weeks before that morning Tracey remarked to a friend that her death was a gift to the ones she loved. Although I do not know her exact words and never had a chance to talk with her about them, they remain the most profound that I have taken to heart. She and her words have been, largely, the architects of my life since then. Tracy was 35 years old when she died. This last May I turned 45.

It is strawberry season again. Easy to forget when you see them all year long in the not-so-super market. This past Sunday, down at the riverfront farmer’s market we saw the first strawberries we’ve seen since last summer. We bought two cartons. They were bitter. The taste equivalent of early spring; bright with color and fragrance but still harsh and sharp. And so each week we will go to the market and buy another carton. We will bring them home, rinse them off and sit down to a bowl of spring fresh strawberries. As we savor them we will practice my favorite grace. We will talk about all of the people who have worked so that we might sit and savor a strawberry. The farmer who works every day of the year. The migrant worker who travels thousands of miles in a year, alone and lonely or with family and family size worries about school and money and health. Did you know migrant workers are not guaranteed the same rights to days off as all the other workers in the United States? Do you know how a migrant worker’s child goes to school, how they learn to read and write? Where they sleep at night? These blessed ones who bend down to pull a delicate ripe strawberry from the plant. The farmer’s children whose chores are a real part of the families success. We’ve been blessed that one of those farmer’s daughters was Q’s teacher when he was 2 and again when he was 4. I say teacher, not daycare worker, because teacher is what she is. What she taught him helped make him who he is and the joy she taught him with helped him to see the world of learning as an exciting and lovely place. We taste the juice (do you remember how juicy real strawberries are? How it spurts out and surrounds your tongue? How there seems to be more juice than there is fruit?) and we talk about the Native Americans and how they cared for the land for hundreds of years. How the plight of Native Americans mirrors the plight of our earth and how the earth has been very nearly destroyed, brought to the edge, is still at the edge and how a few people now are going back and learning from the first Americans. A few wonderful people are going back to relearn what the natives knew for so many hundreds of years. With a great deal of love and work and understanding we can pull this world back into right. We put a strawberry into our mouth and bite down just to the edge of the stem and then suck on the fruit while we twirl the stem in our hands. This very stem another person held it before us. They bent down, held the stem in their rough, overworked hands and gently tugged at it being careful not to crush the fruit until it snapped away from the plant. If I saw that same person on a street in my town would I see their gentleness? We talk about the farmer’s truck and the mechanic who keeps it running year after year after year. How the mechanic might begin to love the truck after so many years and work extra hard to keep it going. And how the farmer appreciates the mechanic who keeps his old truck going. We talk about the men and women who many years ago went down to the river which was dirty and unfishable and unswimmable and basically a dump full of old tires and appliances and how they hauled with their bare hands rusted metal and cleaned it up and built a boat that would be a floating classroom and sang, wrote and taught songs that we sang on Sunday at the festival. And now because of them there is a lovely little harbor where farmers come – the farmer and his wife and his children come – and sell what they themselves have grown. They come from 5 miles away and they come from 30 miles away. They are our neighbors, and we sometimes forget that we are blessed.

We talk as we eat our strawberries week after week. Food. It is precious. It is divinely given. We say grace. My favorite grace. May God bless all, each and every one of the people and their children and their families who brought us these strawberries. May their life be sweet.

And then one week we buy 6 cartons, when the red is the reddest and the scent is the strawberriest. When the taste is the forever taste of strawberry then we stack the containers gently in our canvas bag and carry them home trying not to let too many of them get crushed to juice. We whip fresh cream, which comes in a glass bottle from a farm a few miles away from our house. Sometimes the cream smells of the grass that the cows that gave this milk ate that morning. We fill an old pottery bowl with the cool freshly whipped cream and we take another large bowl and fill that with water, gently pour the strawberries into the water and carefully drain them. Finally when the sun is slanting through the yard and the heat of the day is ebbing, we make shortbread biscuits. When the warm biscuits are pulled from the oven we stack them in a basket lined with a napkin and take the strawberries, the cream, the biscuits and some mint tea and we go outside to sit on a blanket in our little backyard. Sitting on the blanket under the dogwood trees we eat our dinner. One night a year a dinner of nothing but shortcake biscuits, a big bowl of whip cream and a huge bowl of the ripest most lovely strawberries that God can give to the world. And we give thanks to God for every person who helped bring those strawberries out of the ground to us. We do this because we are alive. And we are grateful.

Tracey’s dying gift was that she taught me that I am alive. I am alive. Today. Here. Now. I am alive. Her death brought me a greater gratitude for what I have. Her death taught me that there is no such thing as a bad day (bad mood yes, a bad day, no) and that the arrival of strawberries in spring is worthy of a celebration and that the people who are never celebrated are the very ones worthy of all our esteem. Lastly she taught me that the only reason we are here is to love each other well and when you love someone you don’t let them pick your strawberries and then deny them a day off, healthcare and education for their children just so those strawberries will be available cheap and all year long.

Think that’s hard to forget?

Think it’s easy to remember?

Thank you dear friend. I love you.