Strawberry Fields

Early summer joy. Forever.

I don’t just have food obsessions, I have food gathering obsessions. I was born a forager and, growing up, I wanted to pop every random mushroom and berry into my mouth. At summer camp in Alberta, I found Saskatoon berries growing in the brush outside the dining hall, and I hid out in there, dropping the potent smaller-than-blueberries into my blanket-covered canteen (which is what we used for hydration before fancy water bottles — they looked like this) when I should have been at arts and crafts.

That’s why it’s hard to exaggerate my joy when, in young motherhood, I discovered pick-your-own farms in the rolling countryside outside Toronto. Dozens — maybe hundreds — of Saturdays, I packed up my little children and my baskets and drove north or west, Lucinda Williams or Nancy Griffith floating around us and drifting out the open windows.

I came to know where to go when — which farms had asparagus you could snap right off the crowns in early May; who had giant rhubarb plants where you could yank the stalks out of the ground and bring home a pile of sticks in shades of pink and green. I found a farm that had sweet shelling peas in early July — not snow peas or sugar snaps, which are delicious but not that same as what I think of as old-fashioned English peas, like the tender ones sold to us in huge paper bags by our fruit man when I was a child.

Later in July came the raspberries, soaking up the sun on prickly canes. It was not easy work, this raspberry picking — the heat and the insects and the sharp bushes — but we did it, my little children and I, and if they complained, the memory is drowned out by the drone of happy bees and the flavour of those warm raspberries in red and black and sometimes even sweetest yellow.

Easier by far are strawberries, which grow close to the ground where little children can find them, and that’s what Maya and I took Hart to gather last Sunday. As we drove toward the highway, I was swept up in a wave of nostalgia and the inevitable thoughts on the passage of time. How could I be old enough to be taking my adult daughter and grandchild berry picking? Hadn’t I just slathered my little three in sunscreen and bug spray, rushing to escape gridlock and a more subtle kind of confinement, in favour of open space and open thoughts? When, exactly, had the days turned into years?

My brooding didn’t — couldn’t — last long. At farm, there was mud to navigate and a fresh wind to breathe into. Arms wide, Hart galloped toward an open field while Maya and I collected berries by the handful. “This is so great,” she said. “I love this.”

“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”