Summers are for strawberries.
Strawberry season is around the corner once again and it is summer. Both are short and sweet.
What is it about picking strawberries that makes so many excited for the start of the season?
- Is it the joy of eating fresh picked, field ripened, juicy sweet strawberries?
- Is it your memories from childhood or that special person you used to pick berries with?
- Is it because of the amazing desserts, jams and jellies you make after a morning picking?
- Is it because you are making memories of your own so that when your children and grandchildren are grown a summer morning will remind them of you?
So many possibilities. For me it is all of the above.
I grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota. We had strawberries. Strawberry mornings remind me of my growing years, a quiet, simpler life, out in the country near the Iowa border. (Of course it was simpler for me, I was a kid, my parents worked hard. ❤️)
When the strawberries were ready, we’d go out in the morning, the warm summer breezes wafting through the air, the heat lingering around us. We’d pick, together, my mom, my grandma, my brothers and I. And the fruit, oh my, sweet goodness.
We ate a lot of them fresh, on ice cream, on our morning Cherrios, on home-made angel food cake with whip cream. My mom taught me how to make strawberry jam; we froze them in pint bags to eat during the winter over ice cream or on cake. It was a blessing to have more than we could eat in summer, because during a Minnesota winter those berries reminded us of summers past and a hope that summer was ahead.
How about you? Why do you like strawberry season?
Judy
