A rainbow in the sky....
- From "The Rainbow," by William Wordsworth
Colorful flags are the rainbow leading to my pot of gold, the red, ripe strawberries grown in small plots all around Visalia.
Sorry, Mr. Wordsworth. Rainbows are great, but this time of year, only one sign, raised high against the blue heavens, makes my heart leap: FRESH STRAWBERRIES.
Ten days of keeping my left foot elevated after surgery for a bone spur had me suffering a bad case of cabin fever. Ron gamely swaddled me in all my protective gear and took me, like a fussing baby, out for a soothing ride in the car.
I’m not just a red-blooded American anymore; I’m a Californian. Despite all the hoopla around here about mass transit and high-speed trains, it is part of the California creed that there is virtually no problem that a car cannot remedy.
I believe.
Sunshine, blue sky, green trees and bright flowers, the wide, gracious streets of Visalia – all a welcome change from switching back and forth between pillows propped on the bed and pillows propped on a living room chair. One of the prettiest sights was a string of brightly colored flags stretched between a power pole and a roadside stand hardly bigger than the sign that announced it: FRESH STRAWBERRIES, lettered in cheery red against a pure white background.
Strawberries, my friends, are the Queen of Fruits. Unless you can make a really good case for cherries, leave your arguments at home, for this court has ruled. Strawberries, plump pockets of seedy red, sweet goodness, rule the Kingdom Plantae.
Here in Visalia, I can get strawberries as early as April and as late as September. Big deal, you say; if I want to pay for them, I can get strawberries just about year-round from my supermarket.
Oh, I know those supermarket strawberries. I used to be part of that captive market. If you couldn’t make strawberries sprout in your clever patio containers, or they weren’t grown close by, you were forced to choose between frozen berries or "fresh" berries trucked in days ago from some far-distant field.
From a few yards away, those fresh berries are tempting in their scarlet brilliance. Get up close, however, and their massive size begins to look steroidal. Red on one side, the berries are often semi-ripe orange on the flip side, fading to a hard, green-white tip dense with immature seeds. Bite one, and it’s like forcing your teeth through a half-frozen berry, the flesh is so firm and unyielding. The taste is vaguely reminiscent of strawberries, but hardly sweet, and without copious amounts of sugar dumped on them, almost flavorless.
Sure, some of those berries come from Mexico or South America, but plenty of them come from California, too. My mother, however, distinguishes those berries from local berries this way:
"Those are grown on the coast."
It is an important distinction. Berries grown from Santa Cruz to San Diego are produced for a national and international market. They have been tweaked to survive time and transportation, hybridized to arrive at supermarkets in, say, Montreal looking as fresh and delectable as the day they were picked from a ginormous field thousands of miles away.
Berries grown in the Central Valley hinterland have usually been produced lovingly by Hmong Chinese or other immigrants, who still feel the magic of the land. Their market is local strawberry lovers who crave an old-fashioned strawberry experience. Their berries are smaller, but they are picked at the peak of ripeness. The flesh is uniformly red, the bite tender, the flavor an explosion of sweet, juicy strawberry.
Visalia is dotted with small strawberry plots throughout the city, low-growing green fields suddenly appearing amid housing developments and commercial centers. If the sandwich board sign has been propped up at the street and the OPEN sign appended to it, o, my heart leaps up!
And on our recent outing, the "open" sign was out at a stand only a quarter-mile from our house. Ron stopped and bought me some strawberries. The current crop was almost at the end of its season, the man told Ron. I mourned my strawberries, even as I bit into their warm, luscious flesh.
Don’t get me wrong: at some point, longing for the reblossoming of the local fields, I will sucker for those supermarket strawberries. I cannot fault those growers for trying to send a quality product to market. But their berries just can’t compete with the local crop.
I will keep chasing rainbows.
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