Industrious Fun

Almost 70, zero humidity, blue sky, slight breeze - perfect weather today. 'Tis the season for strawberry picking.

Mondays are usually a standing playgroup date, but I always ditch (and get my friend Tonya to ditch) when the weather is gorgeous. The location of the playgroup is an indoor soccer complex which is fine in rain or snow, but dismal when the sun is shining and warm. I called Tonya this morning and asked her to come for lunch and then we could go strawberry picking. She happily agreed.

After lunch on my deck, we hopped in her van and headed out to the farm. The man at the farm store joked that the girls should taste the berries first. I said he might want to weigh them before and after. Really, he should have. I think they eat 2 pounds each. Not counting the amount of stains on their chins, hands, and clothes.

The field looks out over rolling hills and the scenery is lovely. Like every farm I've been to in Central New York. Seriously, I moved next door to paradise. The sun was pleasantly warm, the breeze kept bugs away, and the berries were at that perfect stage when they almost burst when you bite into them. You know how you can almost taste the sun in fresh-picked ripe summer produce?

Tonya and I were talking and picking away, and the girls were running in the rows, giggling and eating berries and picking a few for their bucket. Finally they declared that they were itchy and wanted to be done (they had found some tall reed grass they were swatting each other with, which I think was the cause of the itchiness) and we took our containers to be weighed. When they announced "40 dollars" we almost fell over. 21 pounds of strawberries? Tonya asked them to weigh them again. 21 pounds.

We divvied them up at my house, then parted company for the afternoon. It took me an hour to hull all those strawberries. I froze several trays, and had an enormous bowl on the table at dinner for eating. I called Jeff and proposed that if he stopped at the store on his way home and bought cornstarch and vanilla ice cream, he would have fresh strawberry pie after dinner. When the weather is so lovely, it doesn't hurt to turn on the oven for a pie.

I got a call this evening as I was taking my pie out of the oven. It was Tonya saying, "I just pulled a yummy smelling pie out of my oven...." That's how perfect the evening was for pie making, and how perfect the berries were. (And how many we picked that we could be extravagant and make pie!)

I love days like today. It feels like such lazy fun to wander through a farm field on a beautiful day picking red ripe strawberries, talking with a friend, and watching the kids have a blast. It feels so industrious to stash away a bounty of perfect fruit and make a great pie for the family. These are the kinds of days I want to put in a drawer and take out when I need a pick-me-up in the middle of March.