© Another Day in the Country
My chickens are grounded because of the strawberry patch.
Last time they begged to come out, running up and down the fence with their little placards reading, “Freedom, freedom!” I succumbed and opened the door, in spite of the newly planted flower beds.
Brown Betty went straight for the strawberry patch and settled in for a good scratch.
Naïve as I was, I left them to their own machinations in the back yard. When I opened the screen door a couple of hours later there was mass destruction in the strawberry patch.
“Shoooo!” I hollered at them, only to be blissfully ignored.
They weren’t scared of me. Wasn’t I the angel who cooked their potato peelings and gave them greens? Why should they run when I said “Shoooo,” a new word in their chicken vocabulary?
“Get out of my strawberries,” I yelled, brandishing the broom, swatting at their backsides.
The culprits gathered up their skirts and fled toward the hen house with hurt expressions on their little hen faces.
At that time, my berries were in full bloom. Lovely green leaves, long slender stems with pure white blossoms at the tips, nodding in the breeze.
A.C., after chickens, blooms were scattered to the wind, plants uprooted, big holes just the size of a hen all over the patch.
I tried my best to right the wrong, but the symmetry of the plants had been compromised, seriously!
So, I grounded the chickens. No more rooting in the strawberry patch until the season is past.
Picking strawberries — which I’m doing almost every morning — is a tedious affair, so I do a lot of thinking. Actually, it’s more remembering than anything else.
I remember my mother telling me about a farmer just west of Ramona who had a big strawberry patch and how she would go with her siblings and pick strawberries in early summer.
This was such a Kansas treat!
She told me that when the man who grew the berries became old and blind he’d still go out and pick berries. He knew the field and the plants so well that he could still enjoy this small pleasure.
I try to remember the man’s name. Who should I ask to get this fact straight, now that mother is gone?
While I’m picking, I close my eyes and imagine attempting to pick strawberries without seeing their bright red faces peaking out at me.
Especially picking Kansas strawberries — that’s what I call my crop: “Kansas” berries, which are in sharp contrast to what I call “California” berries.
Just down the hill from where I lived in Napa Valley, a Vietnamese farmer grew strawberries — one small field, tucked in amongst the grape vines dominating the valley floor, with straight rows, bright green plants, and early morning workers with those wide conical hats on their heads picking berries.
Later in the day, baskets of bright red, humungous berries would be lined up for sale at the farmer’s little stall.
A dozen of these silver-dollar-sized California berries would fill a basket.
By contrast my Kansas strawberries are loose change — some the size of a quarter and others like nickels and dimes.
When we first came to Kansas, my Aunt Naomi had a strawberry bed out behind her garage.
She fussed over those berries in the spring, disgusted at the invading grass, angry at the pushy weeds, dragging the hose out there to water, salvaging old hay for mulch from the farm that she’d vacated 15 years ago.
She was pushing 80 and her knees creaked as she bent over the strawberry bed. She didn’t dare sit down for fear she couldn’t rise again.
“These berries aren’t big,” she’d say when she arrived at the door with strawberry shortcake smothered in whipped cream. “But just have a taste!”
Oh, they were so good! The flavor was so intense your tongue just danced. I’d forgotten what good strawberries tasted like, having become so used to those super-sized, bloated berries, grown in mass from California.
Berries, I muse as I pick, are like the people who inhabit the land — more intense in Kansas, perhaps because they are survivors. And just maybe, if you give them the water of your kindness and shelter one another from the wind, you’ll taste the richness of their flavor.
Meanwhile, like my Aunt Naomi, I’m picking small-change, tart and tangy, sweetly delicious, Kansas berries.
I eat almost as many as I pick and tell the chickens to be patient. Soon, strawberry season will be over and I’ll set the hens free to roam again, hunting for grasshoppers, on another day in the country.