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hello california
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christopher@30seconds.org
Hello California.
Every year for around five weeks (the last of April and barely through the first of June) it's strawberry season in the South. A lot of crops get going around this time, but none holds the tradition and communal feeling like a field of folks rushing between furrows after the largest, freshest berry on the vine.
I guess because none offers to the public like strawberries. It's the only crop open to anyone. Where kids learn about straight furrows and what not to step on, and an older generation picks perfect berries for cakes and sauces.
Nothing quite matches the taste of a berry in the early morning mist, before the sun rises completely, and the mixture of dew and berry mix with your spit and you chew and chew and chew and get a belly ache from eating a pint while you're out there picking for sixteen, maybe twenty.
The best is slicing them up at home and shaking them down real good with some sugar and then freezing them. You can have fresh berries all summer long. Around July, some of the best vodka drinks of the year are made on hot days with berries picked in the later days of May.
I went Strawberry picking this morning.
I was up before dawn and driving down the dusty, uneven roads of a farm out route 29. I pulled slowly around a huge red barn, slanted a few degrees off center, toward the road. Iron posts held a tar covered railroad tie against the base of the barn. The tie was an attempt at keeping the barn straight, but like all things on most southern farms these days it was done with the least amount of money involved and it was done because it needed to be. It was also done with the ingenuity with which these farmers run their lives.
A brown horse stuck its head out a window facing the road, inches from the car. Its wide dark eyes followed me with a turn of its head while it chewed on hay, showing me gums even more brown than the thin hair on its body.
I passed on by a storage shed with several old tractors. One had been torn down for parts and was rusted away, its metal seat leaning against the plank wood shed next to bottles of oil and tins of gasoline, jars of grease and nipple guns. The shed was made from scrap. It looked like drift wood. Grey as primer, clearly untreated, and once again scraped together out of necessity.
Down by the fields an old green grocers scale hung from a post in the ground. Out in front of the scale lay several acres of cabbage, just coming up. Beyond that lay the strawberry fields. An old Negro in overalls ferried folks back an forth by tractor. His plaid shirt contrasted his wide smile and with a wave of his oily cap I was on my way.
The picking was easy. The berries quite large this year. The furrows were covered with stretched black plastic for the first time. It used to be the light tan soil crumbled under your feet. The leaves were healthy and long and the plants still flowered, but, being near the end of the season the farmer had let the weeds go. I found my share of worms, but it wasn't long before I was walking back to the post in the ground where a small old gentleman sat behind a card table with a box of money and a hand drawn sign.
strawberries are .70 a lb.
I hauled out ten pints for a little under $7.00.
So I'm coming California, but I'm not leaving what I am behind...
goodnight 5.22.98
