"Don't come back until you have a cupful. A heaping cupful!"
My late aunt's demands floated into my head as I sat in a ditch late this spring, picking wild strawberries one teensy, tiny berry at a time.
When I was a kid, it was my daily job, from mid-June until the beginning of July, to pick wild strawberries to fill the jam pot.
Each June, my three aunts would arrive from their far-flung homes at the family homestead, where I lived with my parents, grandmother and four brothers and sisters. Aunt Clara and Aunt Theresa lived in Toronto. Aunt Doris lived in Halifax.
These ladies were obsessed with wild strawberry jam. Not tame strawberry jam, which is much more manageable and a lot easier, but jam made from berries about one 20th the size of a cultivated strawberry. Berries that grew in cow fields, hid under wet grass and thistles and stained your knees red, your hands red and your bum red if you sat on your bum while picking. Berries that took a very long time to fill a cup.
"Who's going to man the jam pot today?" an aunt would ask the others each morning as we sat at the table, eating fresh biscuits with a slab of butter and homemade wild strawberry jam with a cup of tea. Each day, one aunt would take charge of the pot, which stayed on the stove all day. The other two aunts went to the field.
So did we. We had no choice in this matter. Each child was required, by some unfair and arbitrary law, to pick one cup of wild strawberries a day. A heaping cup. If we came back with simply a cup, or God forbid, three-quarters of a cup, we were sent right back to the field to heap it.
I mostly went early, got my heaping cup, ran back to the house and dumped it into the jam pot. The sooner it was done, the sooner I could spend doing important kid stuff like climbing trees, swimming in the brook or trying to break into my brother's fort.
My aunts would stay in that field all day, on their hands and knees, picking, picking. While we filled cups, they filled ice cream containers, water jugs, buckets. They seemed to love it.
If someone raised the thought of picking tame strawberries, they'd snort in derision. Nothing tasted as good as wild strawberry jam. Everything else was just a poor imposter.
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Now, 40 years later, I was sitting in the ditch filling my own ice cream container with tiny sweet berries, operating my own jam pot and visiting with my aunts, in my head, as I fell into the particular Zen of berry picking that had infected them all those years ago. It was the first time I had picked wild strawberries since back in those sun-dappled days.
I had got here through an unfortunate series of events. It started with the downturn in the economy, and the loss of my job. Which led to the sale of our house. Which led my husband and me to move in with my mother-in-law last September.
I was pretty depressed. It had been a tough winter. The uncertainties of life had reached up and slapped me strongly in the face. I guess I had always assumed I was immune, but I wasn't. At least I had a fantastic British mother-in-law who had opened her doors and took us in until we got back on our feet.
But I was bored. My job hunt was consuming a lot of my time, but the days seemed endless. Sometimes even hopeless.
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Then, one spring day, I noticed the wild strawberry plants. They were all over the front lawn, reaching down into the ditch, endlessly.
In mid-June, I checked the lawn. It was teeming with berries. "I think I'll pick a few," I thought. I was going to put them on my ice cream.
I took a container and soon it was full. Not heaping, but full. I walked into the house and showed my mother-in-law.
"Oh, you've done well!" she said. She seemed pleased that I was doing something productive. She had watched me in my depression all winter, gently suggesting that things would turn around. They always did.
"I wonder if I remember how to make jam?" I said.
She smiled at me, then disappeared to the basement. She returned with a box of canning jars.
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That first day, my picking resulted in three jars of wild strawberry jam. It was good. But it was a little too thick, and I put a little too much sugar in.
"Tomorrow, I'll make the perfect batch of jam," I said.
I went to the ditch the next day at 8:30 a.m. and came in at noon, this time with a heaping container full of berries. I could imagine the neighbours whispering: "That's Sylvia's daughter-in-law. She's had a rough time. It seems Sylvia has got her counting blades of grass or something."
But I didn't care. As I sat on my bum, staining my pants red, or knelt in the ditch, staining my knees red, I became an expert at getting those berries off the vine. As you do this, you watch the birds. You listen to the sounds of nature. And you visit your childhood. I knew my aunts would be pleased that I got a heaping container of berries.
When I was done, I got the pot out and made four more jars of jam. It was good, but this time it was a little too runny. "That's okay," I thought. "Tomorrow, I'll make the perfect batch."
Because there were still hundreds, no, thousands of berries left right outside my front door. And I had to get them into my jam pot before the birds got them or the sunshine turned them to mush.
And I was thoroughly enjoying spending time with my aunts.
Barb McKenna lives in Stratford, PEI.