3 minute read
REMEMBER THIS
Layers of flavor
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S TRAWBERRY BLU E
Story by Sara Hilton Photos by Hailey Hilton
Macon Township
REMEMBER THIS
“OUTDOORS WE ARE CONFRONTED EVERYWHERE WITH WONDERS; WE SEE THAT THE MIRACULOUS IS NOT EXTRAORDINARY, BUT THE COMMON MODE OF EXISTENCE. IT IS OUR DAILY BREAD.” -WENDELL BERRY
It’s garden season on Strawberry Blue Farm. Dewy summer mornings are now spent weeding and picking before the sun is too hot. The sheep and goats and chickens gather at the fence to watch me work, bleating and baaing and clucking, hoping for treats. They know good things come from the garden. The hens especially love the tomatoes. When it is time for canning, I pour giant bowls of juicy leftover tomato skins and innards into the hen’s pasture. There is always one hen who gets mean. She viciously pecks at the others and then, in a frenzy, grabs one chunk of a dirt-covered tomato in her beak and waddle-runs to a corner. There, she suspiciously guards her scrap while the others feast together on a pile of food larger than they could eat in a day. I get where she is coming from. I’ve sat in many of my own corners, guarding my own measly scraps, so worried about getting what’s mine, that I miss the point. I miss the feast. I only have scraps if I’m only looking at the scraps.
There is something about being forced outside to chores and being in the dirt that seems to pull me out of that scraps doctrine. In the summer, the garden is a doctrine of abundance and miracles. The garden testifies to the real feast.
Here is a place where I tucked a seed into the soil on a cold day. Like a prayer, I don’t understand how it works, how the plant unfolds. It seems impossible, but graciously the growth is not resting on my belief or understanding. Somehow the summer bounty arrives, and we feast on crisp green beans and crunchy fresh corn. We stand in the garden popping cherry tomatoes into our mouths, the skins bursting forth warmth that tastes like the sun. It doesn’t make sense. Here is a place that just months ago was a barren, empty land and then suddenly, there is more than enough. There is food to eat to our fill, food to share. There are root vegetables to store for the winter so that the buttery squash and starchy potatoes will be there to warm us when the world does not. Even then, on the coldest days, when it is easy to retreat to a doctrine of scraps, these piles of nature in my basement still testify to these summer days. “Remember this,” they say. And then, the memory of summer and the garden is there, and I remember that the warmth and bounty always return in an unbroken promise. I know that the cold will always dissipate, and I know that I have enough. n
