Sitting in a Field of Slow-Simmering Strawberries

“Hurry up! You are going to miss your flight!” my son shouted as he took ahold of his sister’s arm and pulled her onward. Their outlines as they raced down the driveway were two cute stair steps, the boy the taller of the two. Into their flight vessel they scrambled while I more slowly took the pilot’s seat with all of my flying supplies—gallon-sized water bottle, two empty glass casserole dishes and a large metal bowl, enough cash to buy us an absurd amount of fruit—as this was a particular mission. It was one we accomplished every March.

It was a forty-five minute flight, which if I had been able to actually get off the ground, I’m sure could have been accomplished in about fifteen minutes. It is an unfortunate business being a land-locked flying machine. There are just so many pine trees to be driven around.

“Get ready to land!” the boy announced as he recognized the particular curve around that particular pecan farm, where all the pecan trees still looked naked except for a bit of moss dangling here and there. The moss was nothing more than a sheet tangled around their feet; they were basically sleeping in the nude, and late sleepers to boot—spring started quite early this year, sometime in mid-January.

Our small plane managed the runway and settled into a nice grassy spot next to one other small plane immediately behind a farm stand. It was made of strips of wood painted grey, which was an appropriate color, as they had been standing there for many decades. The stand looked wise there, if a bit past its prime. The woman we had seen every year for years—the one with the crinkled blue eyes and the slow mannerisms—handed us the standard red plastic buckets that say Ace Hardware on their sides. We followed a well-beaten path into the strawberry field.

The unseasonably hot sun beat down on the strawberries and the black plastic they rested on in their rows of raised beds. So many lush berries were turning rotten on their undersides as they slowly stewed on that black plastic. They were turning themselves into strawberry pie, and I hadn’t even bought them yet. It was a sad sight.

I picked only a quarter of my plastic bucket before deciding the berries would not be worth the money or the drive, but didn’t tell the children. I sat down in the middle of my row, and let them continue their slow meander down their own rows, eating as they went. One berry in the bucket every few minutes, as others entered the mouth.

Hello friend, and what's your name?

Other planes were traveling our flight path somewhere behind us, here and there, leaving an occasional distant sound of engine. A train too passed by, somewhere in the peripheral. Its clickety-clack racket was not unwelcome. Then both human machine sounds hushed, and the woodpecker took up the empty sound in its beak and shredded it while making its own unique noise. It hopped about an ancient-looking pecan tree with trunk fat and wizened and even wiser looking than the old farm stand.

Farm hands were dressed as though they were visiting the grocery store in the spring of 2020, only it wasn’t just their faces that were covered. Every bit of skin, except for hands and eyeholes, was covered over in some protection for the sun. They were moving about with a tractor, heading to the distant fields—a patch of pecan trees, other crops too distant to make out in their smear of green. I sat there grateful that my brief foray into the field only required my straw hat. With that thought, the wind promptly knocked it off me.

Sitting in a field of slow-simmering strawberries with the company of one red-headed woodpecker and two children with red strawberry smeared cheeks, I decided there were far worse places one could jet off to in the morning.