Strawberry fields were wallowing in sunlight that afternoon. McQuesten doesn’t quite have the radiant rows of turnips in greenhouses you’d expect in an “urban farm”, but rather a sprawling jungle of glistening tarps and carrot tops, and frankly, I like it. A tin windmill gleams in the brambly middle field, and if you follow the path along the rusty wire fence, you may find hints of an orchard.
Sunlight beat down on the tangle of bright leaves, nestled close to the dirt. Beneath were moistly shining strawberries, hovering ripe just shy of touching the earth. They were Alpine: wild, cone-shaped, feathery white inside. And small enough to make a volunteer go crazy. But their bittersweet pith tasted like jewels. They popped away from their leaf crown far too easily. I picked and picked and my green basket filled more slowly than I could imagine. My fingers were clumsy and rough in gloves; the little wildflowers were white, spread radiantly like little crowns with perfectly placed drops of snow interspersed with music notes of yellow. “Can I have a strawberry?” a boy on a skateboard paused and asked innocently enough, and when Danielle, the supervisor, said yes, he took many. “It’s an old technique,” Danielle said to me and Maya, the other volunteer, after the little gang of middle school boys had left. “You plant the carrots and strawberries closer to the road, they come and steal ’em, so they let the rest of the produce alone.”
And indeed, the garlic scapes and callaloo were upcurled sunnily and the wind wafted their spicy green scent over the plants. They would be what Maya and I’d take home. Maya said that her dad liked to pickle them, and her entire family now depended on the sour tang of the scapes.
Something about working in a garden–well, I understand the reason that it was created as a kind of heaven on earth. The apricot and plum trees, the stone fruit trees, are withered, but the apple and pear trees further down the fields are bearing little upside-down fruit. I don’t know if my life happens to rearrange itself around whatever book I’m reading but Steinbeck’s East of Eden came to life all around me in bursts here and there, all afternoon, around the orchard and the strawberry field. Just like in Salinas Valley, California, there was something of a summer magic glowing around the vegetable sprouts, in the most primitive and earthen way possible. More hungry children came by. It makes one think about cycles of life.
When I walked home during that late June sunset, the road was pointing me home, and the horizon was shrouded in the evening light that was spilling over the roofs; behind me were dust shadows, creeping like animals from the east, but I didn’t see it. I was walking toward the light of the west, welling up gold in the park playground, where little children were running . In my hands were curling wild garlic scapes and a small basket of strawberries, gleaming in the sunset. Gems from my afternoon.
At home, just before dinner, I washed and sliced the tops off the strawberries. My brother and I ate most of the wet, glistening mound and didn’t leave much for Dad. But he’s more of a grape guy anyway.
* names mentioned are pseudonyms.
