Rinse a bowl of hard California strawberries: perfect, and tasteless. Take a deep breath, and wait for the Ohio strawberries with no shelf life. Then for the three weeks when your grandfather’s strawberry fields burgeon with red fruit, eat them. Every bowl of cereal and oatmeal: strawberries. Eat them whole, off the stem, after dinner. Walk out to the field under a low Ohio sky and put them, sun-washed, into your mouth. Your hands are stained red. Your body smells like the fields.
These berries bruise under your fingers and freeze in a sudden spring chill. You think of your grandfather’s heart like a field of strawberries, an orchard of soft fruit trees: so much, and so frail. He told you once his favorite crop was peaches, until the winter that killed all the fruit trees.
The winter tried to kill him more than once too. The February of his heart attack, or the February of your young uncle’s death. The February you were sixteen you hugged him just before the doctors cut his chest in two.
So make an effort to look good for the funeral. Wear heels two days in a row. Smile and hug everyone. Your feminist mantras die at family functions anyway.
But before you drive away from Ohio, collect a carload of vegetable plants, and wish they were strawberries. The next evening, plant your garden. The sun will set over the last pepper plant; Indiana alpenglow will guide your hands around the tomatoes. In the dusk, as you rake your fingers across the soil, remember the combines of your childhood, turning over the earth late into the spring twilight.
Katie Karnehm-Esh teaches writing and English at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, where she is also a 500-hour registered yoga teacher. She graduated from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, with a Ph.D. in creative writing and an emphasis in creative nonfiction and poetry. Her publications include Fourth Genre, The Other Journal, Topology, and Windhover. She writes about yoga, travel, faith, and holistic health at Annesley Writers Forum.