Meditation on a birthday. |
STRAWBERRIES I sliced the strawberries myself last night. If I taste carefully they have the faint flavor of onion from the wooden cutting board. Sprinkling them with sugar, I let them sit in the blue bowl, until, hour by hour, they gave up their pale pink syrup. I toss the berries now, spreading the tangy juice throughout the slices, and pour them into the glass cup of French vanilla ice cream. To savor them is my reward: the frozen cloud of cream laden with tart red-and-white berries, the crunch of tiny seeds between my teeth. These are not wild strawberries, the tiny jewels I used to pick as a child in a sunny mountain meadow, nor the hidden low bush blueberries which came later, or the fat and scratchy blackberries which marked my hands with speckles of blood and their dark juices. These are tame berries, from the market, but still very good on ice cream, and better than cake for a birthday. Yet, even as I have been thinking of wild strawberries on the mountain, and have eaten slowly, spoonful by spoonful, the sweet, firm bites are gone too soon and the glass cup is empty. I sip the liquid that remains, greedily. At three-forty-five this afternoon I became fifty-five years old. How has that happened? Sarah Unsworth MacMillan May 2009 |