The Last Gasp of Strawberry Season
Strawberry season is coming to an end this week. It’s one of the bright spots of living in Ohio, the way that for a handful of days in June, I have the ability to drive a mere thirty minutes and bite into the sweetest, ripest berry you’ll find anywhere. Never mind that the brief drive puts me squarely in the middle of a community that doesn’t care for me, that wishes passively or actively that I would do them the favor of ceasing to exist; never mind the part of me that’s afraid of what would happen to my husband, to me, if the car broke down. Fear is part of life, and it’s worth it to offer snacks to the brood of chickens that lives on our preferred farm, to greet the rabbits in their hutch. It’s worth it to see look on my husband’s face when he spots the bright orange barn cat, barely past kittenhood, asleep in whichever sun-soaked spot he‘s chosen. It’s worth it to bite into a strawberry picked a scant few hours ago, and let the taste burst to life on my tongue: something bright and clean, simpler and more beautiful than the petty complications of my life.
The nature of strawberry season is to be fleeting. You know going in that it won’t last, that you must maximize the time you’ve got before the plants close up shop for the year. In spite of this, every spring I end up in a state of strawberry-induced euphoria, becoming convinced on some level deeper than logic and knowledge that there will be strawberries just like these every day, forever. No matter how much I try to brace for it, the season’s last bow always sneaks up on me, and it always hurts, in this very small and specific way. It’s not the wrenching pain of losing something forever, or horribly, or too soon; it’s more like those few days at the tail end of autumn, that swell of bittersweet regret as even the most stubborn leaves begin to curl in defeat. For all its cruelty, the way time ends so much only to bring it around again is a strange sort of kindness. It allows us to believe, in whatever way, that we have an understandable place in the hierarchy of experience. It allows us the knowledge that what is impermanent can also be gorgeous.
I have been writing less lately, and it is because a season of my life is ending. I lived so many years disconnected from myself, doing my best to avoid my literal and figurative reflection, that I’ve only recently learned to identify the signs of this kind of event. For a long time I was the sort of person who would realize that I had changed, or that my life had changed around me, only well after the fact; this ability to notice the wilting flowers within myself, the curling leaves of an internal autumn, is both new and a little unsettling. I can feel myself changing, the weather of who I am shifting in a different direction, and it’s good — the only way forward — and sad, the way change can’t help but be.
Like strawberry season, this change is one I knew was coming, and one that managed to sneak up on me in spite of this knowledge. Unlike strawberry season, this part of my life will not be returning to me next year, or any year after that. A human life is more complex than the life of a berry, and sometimes what goes away does not come back again, or returns only in a different form, in different circumstances, with different people. The hurt that comes along with this can be more bitter than sweet, even though in a real way it is as natural as the bleed of fall into winter. Seasons end. Change blows through every life. Accepting this is the work of being a person, for all that that’s something easier said than believed.
After strawberry season comes blueberry season; then there will be peaches, then blackberries, then apples. Summer squashes will appear only to be replaced with butternuts and acorns. The trees that ring the farm I’ve loved so well and for so long are verdant now, but their leaves will change and fall and bloom again, like always. What I’m losing, what I’ve lost, will not return, but this closing season will give way eventually to a different one. I don’t know yet what that season will entail, but I have to imagine a strawberry doesn’t know either, gets planted or plucked without an inkling of what its fate will be. It grows, regardless.
There is a piece in Jonny Sun’s new book, Goodbye, Again, that reads, “You can’t outrun sadness because sadness is already everywhere. Sadness isn’t the visitor, you are.” I am thinking about that a lot lately, as I show up for a visit that is neither my first nor, I’m sure, my last. I cannot outrun sadness; I cannot recapture the peak of the season that is fading, even now, before my eyes; I cannot undo the events that brought me here, or unwind the years I spent caring for people who didn’t care for me, who wished passively or actively that I would do them the favor of ceasing to exist. I cannot know my fate, however desperately I might want to.
But I can bring strawberries to sadness’s table. I can eat them, one after another, and let their clean, bright flavor remind me of my place in the hierarchy of experience. I can grow, and take it on faith that there is a purpose for the parts of me, of my life, that have flowered and faded. I can believe there will be good things in whatever season is to come.