Ripe Strawberries

There are towers of honeysuckle pouring out beauty.  Their scent wafts in the open doors on a gentle breeze, held up by golden sunshine.  It is one of those perfect days.  How can people stay inside on days like this?  The house feels like a prison from which you have to break free.  If I could just let go, I would fly up on invisible wings into the perfect blue sky. 

Is there anything more pure than the bursting red ripeness of a strawberry just ready to be picked, with rich brown dirt clinging to it, glistening in the sun?  I love the strawberry patch.  One of the smells of childhood summer is the warm, sharp, tart yet sweet smell of strawberries.  It immediately conjures the memory of my aunt making strawberry pie, sitting barefoot in the grass on a cool July mid-morning on a day that promises heat, while grandpa sits in a yard chair in the shade, and my uncle takes a morning swim.  This is the perfect comfort of being surrounded by a loving family, and everything being right with the world at the time of the year that was made for children. 

Isn’t that what we all try to spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture or find to begin with?  We wonder where that time went, and why we can’t seem to make it back there.  That time is gone, and even if we return to that physical place, we can never make it back to that time.  It is gone for us forever.

I am now older than my aunt was when she made that pie in the yard.  I never looked at that day through the eyes of my aunt.  Maybe she was hoping to re-capture that time again too.  Then it occurred to me that she may have discovered the path to that time by making it for me.  I can find the shadow of that by creating it for others, especially for children that may not have had it if I hadn’t been there.  If my aunt hadn’t been there to make that pie, would that day have been so golden and pure?  Maybe, I’ll never know. 

I see this same magical feeling in the expression on my dog’s face, in the yawn and stretch of my cat, and the flight of a butterfly across the rich green grass in our yard.  I will keep looking for these moments of pure, undiluted happiness.  Then, I will give it away for someone else.