Home
Can't concentrate. Something called a strawberry
festival going on outside my office window. Who can think about strawberries
on a freezing April day? Apparently, my intern could. (Love that woman.) She
brought me a bucketful of ripe strawberries that are now coating my room with
a sweet smell of brilliant redness, as if colors have scents.Certainly perked up those mid-week blues. This time my lament centers around the fact that I'm homesick again. Oh, don't mind me - it happens once in a while. Although I consider New York my present and future home, I sometimes reminisce about my folks' home and all the good times I had there. Don't believe me for a second when I talk about how boring it was, or how narrow- minded my neighbors were. My sister and I always made our own fun and we liked harrassing those who were offended by our Chineseness.
It's the fault of the strawberries that I'm all misty-eyed and day dreaming. Mom used to take sis and me out to the strawberry patches during the summer. We'd hunch over those 5-inch tall plants and pick the plumpest of the lot, scrutinize each berry for slugs (gross!) before adding them to our already straining-full baskets. The car ride home would be nauseatingly sweet- smelling. I don't remember what we did with our loot .. did we eat them ourselves or distribute them to our friends relatives? Hopefully the latter, but more likely the former.
Daddy, of course, preferred giant Red Delicious apples to measly, squishy strawberries, so in the fall we'd head out in the car to the orchards to pick bushels upon bushels of the crisp fruit. They were a little more dangerous to pick though. Higher off the ground meant less back-breaking work, but for us shrimps all the good apples were always just out of reach. And of course, much more feared and hated than the slugs were the worms. Daddy tried to comfort us by warning that finding a whole worm in an apple was ten times better than finding a half worm. Bleck. Daddy was always full of interesting advice.
There are neither strawberry patches or apple orchards near where I live now, which is terribly disappointing to me. I always imagined I'd take my children to pick fruit at a quaint little farm so that they'd know that fruits had real flavors and that they didn't automatically come wrapped in sanitized plastic at the grocers.' (Come to think of it, fruits sometimes taste like plastic when they're in this condition.) I suppose that, by the time I settle down and have children, I'll have to get a car and go driving for hours on end for an outing like this to take place.
Oh the sacrifices this city girl will make!