strawberry fields forever

We decided we needed a strawberry feast.  Not just a few strawberries as a treat, but so many strawberries that everyone could eat as many as they could stand, and then some, and still have some left over.  An endless strawberry extravaganza.  Bottomless strawberry.  Don’t stop till you get enough.  So we went to a u-pick.

There’s a slice of central North Carolina for you.  We went early on a Tuesday morning and when we got there the place was largely empty.  You can’t really see it from the picture but the plants were loaded. Gobs and gobs of fantastic strawberries, we couldn’t help but sample a few.  At this place, they don’t spray, so it seemed relatively safe.  There are so many ways to get cancer these days, I can hardly keep up.  But these babies were simply wonderful.

Sophie wore sequins.  Of course, what else?  In picking, she went for quantity.  She’s the biggest strawberry lover in the family, and she filled her basket as if she were on a mission from god.  Luc, on the other hand, was more selective.  He only wanted the funny looking strawberries.  “They’re mutant berries, Mom.  And I don’t want anyone else to eat them.  Just me.”

Gradually the fields filled with other pickers, all mommas and non-school kiddos from what I could tell.  It felt surprisingly feminine out there with all the women and children.  The friends to our left were worried about whether one’s teen-age daughter was dating the wrong guy, and whether the other one’s son was old enough to teach tennis.  The group to our right included a couple of grandmothers who had hurting backs but were collecting for canning preserves.  They had many recipe suggestions for each other.  One’s husband was in the hospital with some liver problems.  A couple of toddlers were wandering freely, and one little guy who wore his basket on his head and kept getting shooed out of the plants.  Bending over in the cool air, picking berries, listening to the murmuring conversations around me, it was all so…pleasant.

I don’t mean to idealize any time of the past or create some rosy image of ‘back to the land’ or something.  I’m sure that working out in a field because you have to is a world of difference from choosing one morning to do so as an adventure and as a prelude to gluttony.  In fact, we discovered, upon getting home, that Paul’s family had run a strawberry u-pick on their land when he was growing up!  How could I have not known this?  Sophie immediately thought he must have been the luckiest kid ever, but not so, from his perspective.  “I had to pick the pre-pick buckets,” he grumbled.  Yes, he could eat all the strawberries he wanted, but his main memory was of hating the enforced labor.

I guess the feeling of one’s own freedom is a necessary ingredient to joy.

Sophie couldn’t imagine the downside to having one’s own strawberry field.  She had eyes only for the berries.

By the end, her basket held twice as many as mine did, and ten times as many as Luc’s mutant berry collection.  In all we brought home 14 pounds.  We started eating in the car on the way home, and we didn’t stop for three days.

I made a cobbler.  Then we had smoothies.  And strawberry waffles.  But mostly we just ate them by hand, one after another, free to eat as many as we wanted.  I think these have been the best strawberries I have ever had, just incredibly sweet, tiny, and exploding with flavor.

Strawberries and freedom—an intoxicating combination!