Strawberries

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