Saturday, July 23, 2011

What? Strawberries aren't a year-round fruit?

It is funny the things we forget. When I was a kid growing up in England, I knew that berries had a season. Once a year we all pile in the car to go strawberry picking, and we would love eating the wild blackberries from bushes round where I lived. But as for the rest of the year, if we ate those fruits at all, it was out of a can. The fresh stuff didn't appear. 

And tangerines. They only appeared at Christmas. And not in crates like you get now, but a few at a time.

So I was a bit taken aback when I realized that strawberry season had come and gone in an eyeblink. One week the tables at the farmer's market were full of strawberries, the next - nothing.

Of course, they hadn't really registered. Why should they, when I can get them all year round from God-knows where?

Yes it is nice and convenient and we can do things like eat fresh strawberries and cream in the middle of December, but how much sweeter would they be if we didn't? If you just accepted the fact that you could only get them for a few short weeks in June and July and the rest of the year - nothing. How excited we'd be when the first of the crop appeared, small and slightly sour, and how sad we'd be when we realized they were gone for another year. I for one would have made lots more of my strawberry syrup!

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From Talking Heads 1983 album Speaking In Tongues: Swamp.




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1 comment:

  1. Aaaw. Is the video's unavailability supposed to symbolize the feeling of the missing strawberries? LOL

    ReplyDelete