strawberry fields forever

i'm going to strawberry fields, nothing is real

Part of what I do is writing food articles.  While I can throw in a little humor and storytelling, they need to be not about me and to the point.  Earlier this week I started a piece about strawberries, with the song “Strawberry Fields Forever” stuck in my head.  My brain functioning as it does, wandered back to being a kid and picking berries.  That was back in the day when such “child labor practices” were allowed.

After school was out and the haze of the warming valley arrived, so would the school bus … again.  Not many kids would be excited about this since school was out for the summer (another great song, by the way).  However, the early morning arrival meant that it was berry picking season. 

Once again the buses would wind their way through our neighborhoods, gathering all of us already-bored-with-nothing-to-do kids and plopping us in a berry patch or bean field to harvest the produce.  Such a thing would never be heard of these days.  Someone would be screaming that we were being used and abused by big land barons looking to make an enormous profit on the backs of babies.

It was nothing like that.  Here’s the kid perspective:  You got to hang out with your friends, get a great suntan (we did wear our bikinis to pick and yes, slathered ourselves with baby oil), could eat our weight in strawberries and made a few bucks all at the same time.  Sure, we weren’t rolling in the big cash, but it was enough to go to the county fair, pay for AA batteries for our transistor radios and buy a few clothes for school.

We learned things like, the more you pick, the more you earn; a lesson in hard work.  If you slack off and only eat the strawberries, well, not much moolah at the end of the day.  Imagine that, discovering a good life lesson while groovin’ (yep, it was the 70’s) with your friends.

Sitting on my kitchen counter is a flat of Hood strawberries that I purchased from The Vegetable Man. They are scandalous gems of sweetness that almost collapse in your mouth.  I have visions of freezer jam for when it’s so cold that even penguins want to stay inside.  As you would expect, crumbling shortcakes with sugared strawberries spilling all over the place and maybe a few dropped into a glass of  bubbly prosecco. 

I don’t know who picked these sweeter than sweet rubies, but the sensory affect takes me back to a field with my friends and a transistor radio blasting “It’s the time of the season….” (The Zombies)

Missy

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