Worth the Wait

Last winter we bought some beautiful strawberries at the grocery store and discovered that they were hard as rocks, had solid white hearts, and the taste? what taste?

Someone told us they were really pretty good. Being our usual agreeable self we did not argue.

But we should have. Those were not good berries.

These are good berries.

Summer has come and now we are reminded of what a strawberry is really meant to be like. 

Red all the way through, best the very day it is picked, juicy, 

and full of ecstasy-producing flavor without need for sugar, chocolate coating, 

or any other distractions from its amazing strawberryness.

It is even a good thing that summer berries do not keep for more than a day or two. 

The same breeding that enables a strawberry to be transported for hundreds or thousands of miles and keep for weeks in the frig also takes away all that makes strawberries divinely desirable to eat.

See that juice in the bottom of the bowl. Just try to get one of those plastic January pretend strawberries to ooze even a drop of it. And if you see us in the produce aisle next winter reaching for a plastic clam-shell full of out-of -season zombie berries, please remind us that if we take them home we will be disappointed. 

Very, very disappointed.