Straw Breeze
A cultural/horticultural epiphany at the beach
It is a short two and a half block walk to work for me on those days that I work. The first block that I walk is down an alleyway between the back yards of 1950s suburban homes. There is almost never any traffic unless a trash truck is going down the alley emptying trash dumpsters. It is a peaceful and quiet walk. I can empty my mind and then recite my affirmations that I will make it through the approaching shift at work. I can also say hello to a certain dog in a certain back yard.
And at certain times of the year I can stop to sniff lilac bushes (like right now). But there is another treasure that awaits me over the course of this short one-block walk. Behind an old dilapidated garage behind someone’s house there is a small patch of strawberry plants. I love strawberries — or as the British call them, “Straw breeze.”
A new family moved into that house about four years ago and I am convinced that they are utterly, thoroughly, profoundly, and completely unaware of their strawberry patch behind their old dilapidated garage which they never use.
I, on the other hand, am keenly aware of that delightful little strawberry patch. I can spot a strawberry plant from a hundred paces. And I observe this particular strawberry patch throughout the year, noting its various cycles.
I have been eating free strawberries every late June for over four years now. Since the family does not even know about the strawberry patch they do not take care of it nor do they spray it with toxic chemicals. I am truly thankful for this.
But late last summer someone in that family took a gas-powered weed trimmer and whacked down the strawberry patch. (Ignorant bastards!) Thankfully, this did not seem to destroy the plants for they have come back in all their wonderful glory.
The strawberry patch is in full bloom right now and I pray to God that the property owners don’t whack the patch down again before the strawberries are ripe. I am looking forward to strawberries.
A few decades ago I was good friends with a woman from England. I met her because she married a friend of mine. We immediately hit it off. We would visit and talk for hours. A good portion of our conversations centered around making fun of each other for how we mutilate the English language. It was all in fun but sometimes our language debates took on a higher voltage, so to speak. It always freaked me out how the word, ‘strawberries,’ was pronounced, ‘straw breeze,’ by my English friend. Seriously, how do you get ‘breeze’ out of ‘berries?’
I pointed out to her that she pronounced blueberries correctly. She did not say, ‘blue breeze.’ She said ‘blueberries.’ So why did she say, ‘straw breeze?’
She then decided to teach me the correct way to eat strawberries — which, apparently, was with cream.
I then taught her the correct way to eat strawberries — which is to pull it off the plant, pluck away the green stem and cram it into one’s mouth.
We must have discussed strawberries for hours over the year that I knew her. Sadly, she divorced my stupid friend and went back across the pond. We discussed a lot of other things and often fell into points of contention. (Don’t even get me started on Shakespeare.) But it was always in fun. I miss those delightful conversations.
Despite all her psychological pathologies, my mother and I had one thing in common and that was our love for gardening. If pushed, I even admit that her love of gardening helped foster my own.
In the backyard of our suburban home in the hot, arid desert of far west Texas my mother tried for years to grow strawberries in her garden. She tried every trick in the Reader’s Digest Book of Gardening but year after year she failed. I intently followed the progress of her little strawberry patches. They would bloom each spring as they were supposed to — and aren’t those little white blossoms cute? I watched the flowers wither away and delighted as little green fruit started to appear. Checking them regularly, they grew and grew but every year before turning red and ripening they would wither away and disintegrate. I was pissed off every year and so was my mom.
Many, many years later I found myself living for a year in Washington State. Washington State happens to be the strawberry capital of America.
One day I was driving to the little weird town of Yelm. I looked off to the side of the car and saw a field filled with a crop that I could not identify from the road so I pulled off the road and walked out to the field. It turned out to be a humongous field of strawberry plants. The plants were done blooming and the fruit was green and about half the size of pick-able red strawberries. I made a mental notation of where that field was as I intended to come back when the fruit was ripe and go to town stealing fresh strawberries.
I brought several baskets with me the next time I had reason to travel to Yelm (don’t ask me why I went there). I stopped alongside that very same strawberry field and got out of the car carrying some fruit baskets. My little daughter also got out carrying some fruit baskets. I was looking forward to teaching her how to pick (steal) strawberries.
But before we reached the field I noticed a low-flying airplane. It was a crop-duster and it was billowing out clouds of toxic herbicides, fungicides and herbicides and god-knows what else. I stopped my daughter and told her that we had to quickly get back in the car. Her strawberry education would have to wait.
At some point during that magical summer in Washington we took a little vacation to Ocean Shores, Washington on the coast. We rented a cabin right on the beach and spent four days playing on the beach as the mighty Pacific Ocean lapped at our feet.
We had so much fun playing in the water and on the beach and in the sand dunes above the beach. At one point my tiny daughter was chasing me up into the sand dunes and I pretended to slip and fall onto a sand dune (allowing my daughter to catch up). As I awaited my daughter’s triumphant “catching of me” I looked around at the sand dune.
I noticed some tiny plants that looked just like strawberry plants — except they were tiny. I pulled back the leaves of a plant and, sure enough, there were little, itty bitty, red strawberry fruit! To my sheer, utter, euphoric delight I had stumbled onto some WILD strawberry plants!
The fruit was very red and apparently very ripe. I picked a wild strawberry and plopped it into my mouth. Whew! It was delicious but it was a bit tart. It had a very mild sweetness to it but nothing like a grocery store strawberry. It made my mouth pucker a little bit.
I ate about four or five of them when I realized that my daughter was calling out after me. It was my turn to chase after her. Before I got up, though, I noticed a small piece of dried stem — a piece of straw — being blown by the breeze. It landed up against a wild strawberry plant. Lifting up the leaves of several wild strawberry plants I noticed that all the wild strawberry plants were resting on a bed of straw.
I finally got it! Strawberry plants like to grow surrounded by straw so that their fruit could rest on the straw instead of the dirt or sand beneath the straw! This is what kept the fruit from spoiling. It was the straw…
…the straw that was blown about by the breeze!
I finally understood what ‘straw breeze’ meant!
I wished that my old English friend was there so that I could hug her and tell her that I finally understood. I wanted to take back all the derogatory statements I made about her English pronunciations. I wanted to thank her for showing me something that I would not understand for years.
But sadly she was not there. Instead, I got up and chased after my little daughter towards the Pacific Ocean which was coming at us like…
…well, like an ocean. (Just like life comes at us.)
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