it is just one strawberry

My weekends have evaporated into something that I have yet to name.  They have become something that I enjoy – warm, heavy with work and chores, meaningful in the way that objectives are completed. But at the same time, there can be come tedious monotony in the day, a weird existence in blisters and staring down a long row of uninterrupted wild garlic.

Then, between the chickweed and the grass clumps, the first strawberry flower of the year comes into peripheral vision.  I stop. I stop and I think deeply. At some point this flower will turn into a berry, starting off white and green and solid.  From there the fruit moves into pink and on into deep red, the yellow seeds dimpling the fruit in diamond patterns.  Someone will eat it.  It could quite possibly be me or someone else from Circle Acres. Or it could be a CSA member or a market customer.

Not a big deal.  It is just a strawberry.

But it is a big deal when I think on it some more. We are growing something that someone is going to put in their bodies. They are going to use the sugar and vitamins in that berry to do things. They will walk to the mailbox or push in the clutch or scramble an egg using the energy from that berry. When I sat there weeding and thinking about that flower and following it through its development and on through the blood vessels and organs and paths of digestion and protein building and ATP and the breaking and formation of energy bonds and cell walls and divisions and… Well, it all made me a bit insane for a second.  I had to catch myself, get my head back together.

It is just one strawberry.