Berry Imperfection: A Summer Essay
By Anne-Marie Oomen
Sun contributor
The last jar of last June’s strawberry jam rests empty on my kitchen counter, clotted and sticky. David looks sad. The dog hangs his head as though scolded though he had nothing to do with the quandary we face. It was purely luck that last summer’s strawberry jam made it from last solstice to this one. That jam is holy, that jam is winter survival, that jam is antidote to cloud laden days when sunlight is veiled in some stratospheric turbulence the size of Jupiter. That rosy jam spread thick on brown bread reminds us that light does exist. I lick the rim of the jar. Clearly, the succulence that saves us must be replenished.
The farmer’s market, yes, those beloved vendors! But this year, the strawberries are ridiculously pricey. Even in the grocery store, the cost of a quart feels like buying bit coin. I don’t begrudge farmers, but for me, a different issue rises. The market strawberries, though they may be from regional fields, from farmers whose names are household lingo (think Norconk’s asparagus, Lively’s Market lettuce!)—those strawberries look perfect. Handsome. So fetching they glow in the dark. Miniature hearts specked with the golden seeds, stacked perfectly in their molded green tubs. That perfection is the problem. When you jam strawberries you don’t want lookers, you don’t want the allure of dipping that perfect shape into warm chocolate. Those are special occasion strawberries. That perfect berry just guilts us jammers. Because we know the truth; to arrive at that February jam you have to crush that summer beauty. Jamming starts with the brutal pleasure of destruction. What you want for jam are ugly darlings—the berries no one who cares about appearances can love. You want a berry the size and shape of old bolts. Seedy, a little fibery, odd-hearted. And Imperfects, small and lumpen gems, hide a sweetness so piquant it breaks your own beating heart. That’s a jamming berry. Perfect for that February reprieve when you spread a summer sunrise on that winter brown bread.
So, you might ask, when do you use a perfect berry? When David and I were married on a rainy February day over thirty years ago, we were both so nervous we arranged to serve strawberries (in February!) and champagne before the wedding to all of our guests. Together, me dressed in my fine lace and he in his excellent tux, we dared to offer fifty trembling flutes of bubbly to fifty guests, each glass draped with a perfect strawberry slit onto the rim so the juices ran and tinted the bubbly. It worked. An anxious judge, the opinionated maid of honor, a high strung poet, all the wild-hearted colleagues who had crashed what had been an intimate wedding for a few, even my up-tight parents—each Being saw that scarlet nugget perched on the glass like miniature fire and smiled—and that tense and fog-saturated day slipped sideways into laughter. That heart-shaped sweetness bled into the champagne and they could not resist. We raised those glasses high and no one spilled, though there were some seedy toothpicks later. Now I suspect those Perfects had been on the road or the ship for weeks before the caterer, at some expense, found them. Back then, we didn’t care; the rite of our vows turned perfect with those rosy beauties. So save the Perfects for ritual shortcake, ice cream, the elegant compote. Weddings. The summer ceremonies.
It’s the imperfect ones I hail right now, and for me, memory: that rural childhood where I learned to cherish the Imperfects. For a few short years on my father’s farm, a handful of strawberry acres captured his attention. On those mornings when the dew dried off, we kids joined other workers, locals and seasonal folks, all of us bending to the tiny hearts, thrusting our hands into the leaves, brushing them aside to find the fruit. My mother oversaw the operation with precision. The perfects, the ones she called “firsts” were carefully basketed and sold, but she was not one for wasting any darn thing, and so insisted we also pick “seconds,” those gnarly ones that would not pass muster for beauty. Those she saved for jam.
Strawberries take a lot of energy and TLC . Sadly my father didn’t have the patience. Even after he bought the geese (yes, geese). He’d been told they would eat the slugs and other pests and save him a bundle of money, but the creatures merely developed a taste for the strawberries and became territorial—they regularly chased us kids out. At that point, my father tilled the field under and we ate goose for thanksgiving. But the jam made of those seconds—that saved us on those winter Lenten Sundays when we were allowed a single scoop of ice cream topped with a spoon of strawberry jam, the one dessert of the week. There was hope after all.
So, while I do respect Perfect berries, there is jam to be made, and jamming magic rests in imperfection. I send a frantic cry to the universe via Facebook, and dear friend Jim, who once ran the Sweeter Song CSA, texts that his remaining patch is ours for the gleaning. He’s picked the big ones he wants. I love that word, glean. I want it to happen in every field, for every harvest, every imperfection life offers. That damp and over cast morning, he shows my friend Mimi and me which rows. Ever grateful, we bow to the bushes, a kind of reverence, and slowly fill the baskets. I am a child again, shoes wet in damp earth, bending and brushing the leaves aside, looking for the small and overlooked, gleaning the gleaming Imperfections that make life sweet in winter. My hands are damp as I lift a lumpy sister to my lips and bite into a summer that fills me up with wonder. Here is the life we must live, picking the imperfect over the perfect, making the world better by embracing the lesser berry, gleaning what good sweetness we can for a long winter.
