LAZING IN STRAWBERRY FIELDS...

LAZING IN STRAWBERRY FIELDS

Jacqueline Colaco    

One of the pursuits I enjoyed during my years in the US during the mid eighties was to go fruit-picking in the summer. Once, a group of us friends drove out of New York City for about two hours before we reached our destination – a strawberry farm in New Jersey.  Having grown up in Bangalore where strawberries are a rare treat, and even more so in a family of seven children, I had not seen more than a few dozen strawberries during my thirty odd years - and eaten even fewer! It was an absolutely exhilarating sight therefore, to suddenly behold these endless rows of strawberry plants appearing as a riot of dark green dotted with bright red fruit. Immediately, the Beatles song ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ came to my mind.  That’s just what they looked like, stretching into the horizon.  After collecting empty baskets at the reception counter, we let ourselves loose in the fields.

Strawberry plants grow to a very small height and therefore the leaves and fruit are often covered with soil.  Well, muddy or not, we indulged ourselves with mouthfuls of tasty, luscious strawberries.  What euphoria!  We ate ourselves sick.  Our group consisted of a few adults and a couple of kids, crouched on our haunches a few feet from each other, picking our strawberries. We chatted and gossiped and enjoyed the easy camaraderie of friends spending the day outdoors together.  After an hour and painfully stretched muscles, we returned to weigh our packages, which were ours to take home at a nominal price.  We planned on eating them with cream, making jam and freezing them for winter months.  We even dreamed of growing them in hanging baskets in our city apartments!

But what happened was this.  We lost our way home in the maze of expressways that is the US of A, and our two-hour journey ended after seven tedious hours.  It was the height of summer, the car was a compact one and the strawberries began to ferment.  By the time we reached home, we were overpowered by the smell.  We could not bear to take them into the apartment, so down the garbage chute they went, just like that!  But we really couldn’t have cared less at that point – we’d had enough and more of strawberries…

Sitting in Bangalore now, decades later, I dream wistfully of all those strawberries we so callously threw down the drain – their overpowering smell which I still remember, now seems even inviting! In Bangalore, strawberries are still rare and expensive…