Strawberry Memories

When I was a child, my family went to the local strawberry and apple orchard once a year and picked enormous quantities of strawberries.  We would take them home in cardboard flats, eating them by the handful as we went.  Then, my grandmother and mother would shoo me out of the kitchen while they spent hours making strawberry jam that would last all winter.  

Enjoying a strawberry slushie after a grueling
30 minutes of strawberry picking!

Forty years later, I don't make jam; but the boys and I do enjoy strawberries.  This week, on a sunny warm day, Spencer, Denver, and I went to Mitcham Farms to fill our buckets.  
As we picked, I couldn't help noticing all the young mothers with their young children toddling about and enjoying the sunshine.  My sons, 13 and 10, tall and strong, didn't have to be told not to squish the plants. They didn't have to be encouraged to put a few more strawberries in their buckets.  Those days have passed.  The boys and I chatted and worked as a cheerful team. 

Within 30 minutes, we had loaded buckets and were happily sipping strawberry slushies in the shade while tired toddlers and their mothers and grandmothers were still searching for berries or had given up and headed for the car.

And yet . . . I miss my own grandmother and the memories of my children as toddlers.  Those memories are sweeter than these strawberries: my grandmother serving us cold strawberry jam on warm toast in the winter; my own children eating strawberries straight from the plant while sitting, tired and hot, in the strawberry field.