Exercise: Strawberry Serenade
from the drafts
*Pop*
The thick bottle of sparkling strawberry wine released a few bubbles as I clumsily freed the cork from its mouth. But to my surprise, no sweet scent of esters is released from the bottle. I held it up to my nose and inhaled, picking up the smallest whiff of strawberries. Hoping to share the smell of summer, I offered a whiff to my friend but knew this wine would never smell the same in the city.
“I typically save this for special occasions, but nothing ever feels special enough.”
“Really?” She sighed, and leaned back against a flower pot to support her back. We propped ourselves up with our hands, pressing them into a blanket that was thoughtfully styled on a rooftop in Capitol Hill. We were waiting for a collection of local musicians to play a pop-up show, the city skyline and orange sunset as their backdrop on a smoky August evening.
“Not that this isn’t special, I just want it to be appreciated.” I had been holding onto this bottle for a whole year, as I do every year, when my dad buys me a dazzling bottle of Strawberry Serenade from the farm that I used to work on. For the prior five years, I had made it an unconscious habit of holding onto each bottle for a whole year until I was gifted the next. Waiting for the right moment to savor it yet letting every occasion pass. Holidays, birthdays, break-ups, moves, dates, graduations, celebrations of love and friendship, engagements, promotions, new jobs, and homecomings. I let each moment pass, resisting releasing the memories contained in the bottle.
Knowing that its peak sweetness was about to pass, I shared it with a friend who I trusted could appreciate the sentiment. A collection of memories brewing inside of me- fermenting, just waiting to be released. But as the effervescence of the wine drifted, so did my excitement–falling flat with disappointment. Shamefully, I drank most of the bottle all by myself throughout the course of the show. Each sip an attempt to search for something that has felt missing in my life since moving to the city. Just a week prior, I had visited the 400-acre farm that I worked on in Connecticut before moving to Seattle, adoring mid-summer figs, grapes and of course–wine. In just a few hours of chatting on the gravel patio with my former manager where we used to eat my lunch, I felt more grounded than I had in years. And I continued to search for the unidentifiable source of that in the bottle of strawberry serenade.
When the show ended, I tossed the empty bottle in a recycling bin on my way to pick up the 8 downtown. As I waited for the bus on East Olive Way, I found myself desperate to relive the sweet memories created by summer strawberries. Once on the bus, I closed my eyes to try to push aside the smell of wildfire smoke and concrete sidewalks and focus on the memory of the sparkling strawberry wine. As I dropped into my body, it reminded me of the first time someone opened the bottle for me in the lower level of the winery barn. Remnants of strawberries dropped and released themselves into a small wine glass, contesting the smell of the pine barn. As the wine poured, bubbles released into the air– each carrying a different memory of how the strawberries arrived there.
I took a deep breath and was taken back to the winery. Drifting notes of overripe strawberries compete with the effervescence of last summer’s white grapes. On rainy summer days when there was no work to be done in the kitchen nor fields, Lawrence and I had the privilege to escape to the winery away from the college interns. We knew nothing about vinification but spending an afternoon alone at the highest hill of the farm felt like a treat. Filling bottles, sticking labels, swapping stories from the field. No real work to be done– just idling in the clashing smells of an extended summer.
In the harshest heat of the summer, the garage doors of the winery greet you with the smell of hundreds of gallons of strawberries brewing in large blue vats. As they brew, fermenting sugar rises to the top, releasing itself into the air as a sour gas. Light pink bubbles of protein rise to the top, forming a cotton candy-like cloud that carries rogue strands of hay. Most harvests are clean, but in the heat of summer, a hasty harvest is encouraged so as not to waste berries that may turn overnight. The pink pillows seduce yellow jackets, just as far-gone strawberries do in the fields. But instead of these yellow jackets carrying on with their day, they become intoxicated off the brew and take a slumber in the coral clouds. A walk past the vats is reminiscent of a walk through the rows of green strawberry beds as hot moisture tries to resist being released from the ground. Ankles and shins passing through them as if they were trudging through a hot June cloud.
I take another deep breath in, remembering the aroma of plump berries in the valley farm. In early July, the fragrance of sweet juices rises in the beating sun– so strong that it greets guests as they pull into the parking lot. Heat traps itself in the valley, cooking down the strawberries until they’re left for the bees- dripping their nectar into the billows of hay. If you walk far enough into the valley, the chalky smell of adolescent pumpkin leaves compete with the sweetness of strawberries, marking the transition into the late summer.
When guests move onto picking blueberries and the sun peaks in the sky, the strawberries get their seasonal “buzz-cut”. Their runners soak up the sun by reaching out their arms as wide as possible and sink their roots into the soil. Rogue late bloomers can be found in each row if you gently lift their leaves. Having their 15 minutes of fame as they grow a small yellow sun with round white rays.
I took one last deep breath in and found myself back in the kitchen on the homestead farm. The kitchen captures more than the fields and winery ever could. In the fields–the seasons come and go; in the winery–they age and ferment; but in the kitchen–they’re perfectly preserved with several cups of sugar to brighten the sweetest memories of summer. Blues rock plays in the background as I rock back and forth on the tile. Hot steam from multiple large pots soothe my skin as I lower a dozen jars into a bath of boiling water.
In small batch cooking, only five pounds of strawberries sit on the stove at a time as they condense into jam. But those five measly pounds have such a profound effect on every person who walks through the kitchen door. It was a deep joy to watch the folks who spend their winters waking up at 4am to make sure water pipes in the field don’t freeze, experiencing the literal fruits of their labor. A few times a week, my jam making was interrupted by at least one ragged man–slumped shoulders and leathery skin barging into the kitchen to deliver information about the farm’s operations. But as soon as they opened the door, the sweet humid air stopped them in their tracks. Their faces relax and eyes widen as they’re pulled toward the tables of cooling jam just like bees swarming to a late harvest. And if they’re lucky, they might be present just long enough to hear a cooling jar pop as it seals. A pop so faint and shallow, you’re only sure that you heard it because your body subtly jolts in a reflexive response.
Last year's harvest cooks down on the stove as I brighten the memories with sugar, lemon juice, calcium, and pectin. Light pink foam rises to the top, and I scrape it off and into a metal bowl of foam that I’ve been accumulating for the past week. Strawberry jam is lumpy, thick, and sweet but the foam is a special treat shared amongst the kitchen staff. I collect the unsalvageable foam for a few days at a time until we celebrate the coming of our “weekend”. When no guests are around, Emily and I sit on the patio for lunch, shaded by grape vines and figs. Emily defrosts last summer's scones and we savor the end of summer by dipping them into the foam– complemented of course with a block of Cabot cheddar cheese.
I don’t know if I’ve ever understood why so many people glamorize farm life. I suppose they imagine kicking their feet back on the porch and watching time go by– but what about your overstretched back during the scalding weeks weeding chickweed? Or bird netting repeatedly catching the button of your baseball cap. Dodging wasps and lightning storms as you prune grape leaves on the hill side. Blisters from spending rainy days doing nothing but folding cardboard carrying trays. Love burns on your arms from the oven that you forget exist until you reach for a hidden spoon at the bottom of a sink full of scorching water. The sun beating on your back as your arms extend above your head for hours while they carefully prune blue spruces. Although I have yearned for this life, none of it has ever seemed sexy. It just let me exist within my body.
But maybe this is what they crave. Every ounce of produce must either be turned into sellable product or returned back to the land. It’s rare that I get to enjoy anything that I’ve helped grow or make for myself. But now that I’m sitting on this wire chair designed for guests, dipping unsellable scones into unsellable foam, I finally understand what others are yearning for– and I don’t think they even know. It is loving the land so much that it finds the most tender ways to love you back. Sharing with you the phases of a life cycle that are so fleeting and unstable, not even sugar can preserve them in a bottle or jar. Because it is not savoring the fruits of our labor that truly brings us joy, but being intertwined with a life cycle through our love and labor that does. The practice of that love is what I’ve been missing.
Stop Requested, announces the bus as it pulls up to my stop. And in that instant, all of my strawberry memories pop. I stepped off the bus and continued my commute on the sidewalk by foot. Newly planted trees all around me, but compared to the pavement, they are sparse. The first apartment building that I lived in passes me and I’m reminded of the thin strawberry plants that grew on the rooftop as ground cover. They piqued my interest when I first discovered them, but never seemed to grow. The poor vines had only a few inches of flat, compact dirt to grow in, rarely producing more than a few buds. As I passed through blocks of construction, dust clouds filling the air, I realized that of course I’ll never be able to savor the fruits of nature when we refuse to give them room to grow.