Strawberries Lost

What follows is an essay I had published in New Texas: A Journal of Literature and Culture in 2005. I don’t know if more than a handful of people read it—but I do know my beloved mom did, and she liked it, enough to reread it a few times over the years. I’m making it my first post here, dedicated to her. She is still alive, but no longer with us mentally. May her memory be a blessing.

Photo by reza shayestehpour on Unsplash

Strawberries Lost

“Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus.” (“The true paradises are the paradises one has lost.”)—Marcel Proust

            I have always been pleased at the good fortune I had to be born in early May. In Texas, where I began life and live once again, my birthday can never disappoint. Each year I gratefully accept my gratuitous gifts: the splendor of fresh new greenery covering the surrounding countryside, warm days tinged by cool evenings, the pervasive aura of physical and spiritual renewal, and, above all, strawberries. Hope and promise dipped in cream and sugar.

            The necessary corollary to such enjoyment comes, of course, in July. July ushers in the season of loss. By then, the Texas sun has burned the grass and the gardens and the optimism of spring. The strawberries are gone. I realize, having inhabited and visited other climes, that this is not a universal condition of life. In fact, in some parts of the world, the berries only come to perfect fruition in late summer. I found this to be the case in Belgium when my mother and I made a July visit to some friends in Brussels. Our friends had proposed a day trip to Bruges, a lovely medieval town, just a two-hour drive away. Not least among the benefits would be the route which would lead us right through a small village known as the strawberry capital of Belgium.

            We were delighted; our guidebooks had neglected to mention such a culinary paradise. As it turned out, we didn’t need a guidebook to lead us there. The intense aroma of strawberry came out to greet us. In a few minutes the first stands appeared, brimming with row upon row of luscious red fruit. Each stand, each basket, each berry beckoned. Where should we stop? Were these riper, those juicier, the next ones less expensive or more flavorful? All at once, my mother and I became aware of a slight chill accompanied by terse whispers from the front seat.  Apparently while we had been lost in delicious anticipation, our host and hostess had entered into some kind of disagreement. We looked at each other questioningly and strained to catch the low rumble of unhappy voices. “Fine,” we could just make out, “then let’s forget it. We won’t stop at all.” “That’s fine with me,” came the hissed reply. They both stiffened visibly; so did we. Surely, they didn't mean.... An uneasy silence settled over us as the car sped past the stands, the town square, the cafés. My mother and I looked at each other with desperation now. “Um, uh, how about this one,” I started weakly, “we’d really love to stop, couldn’t we try...”—but the frozen silence cut me off. We turned to watch as first the village itself and then the lingering scent disappeared.

            In fifteen minutes the chill had thawed, and our charming hosts were chatting happily with each other and with us. We drove on to Bruges, had fresh mussels and crisp Belgian fries and tall foaming glasses of golden Pilsner. We wandered the cobblestone streets, relaxed in a shady courtyard café, admired the Michelangelo Madonna. We returned to Brussels by a different route.

            For our hosts, it was a minor tiff, the kind of lovers’ quarrel that sweetens the reunion. They had three more years to savor the regional pleasures. But for us, the opportunity was gone. Of course, there’s no going back: no aroma, no flavor, no pleasure to be had in this world could live up to the intense flavor of regret, of loss, of opportunity passed by. People speak of sour grapes; perhaps this is the experience of sweeter strawberries.

            Back at home, I searched for a literary touchstone to help me overcome the lingering disappointment.  Poetry had, after all, helped me deal with the truly serious losses and hardships of life. That hadn’t always been the case. For my first thirty years, my love for words was purely aesthetic. I didn’t actually admit that openly. My husband, a philosopher, argued convincingly that if poetry was just a matter of beautiful sounds and lovely images, it couldn’t really matter. It had to come down to meaning, to something significant that the words revealed. I claimed to agree. I myself taught students the magical power of words to invoke, to heal, to help us see and hear and taste the world. It’s no surprise that in so many cultures words can open doors and create earth and heaven. Still, somewhere inside I knew that my attraction to them was less admirable.

            Only later when I came face to face with the losses life eventually, inevitably offers did I discover the truth of my lofty claims. When, in my early thirties, I found myself unexpectedly pregnant, Sylvia Plath and Judith Wright helped allay my apprehensions. When the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, my husband, my mother, and Anthony Hecht helped me through. Years later, a similar discovery was prompted by my husband’s father. Ravaged by the lethal cancer that had invaded his entire body, he stubbornly refused to admit he was dying. His denial made hospice care impossible and led him through a series of painful and ineffectual procedures. My husband was upset, frustrated, even a little ashamed. Why not accept the inevitable with quiet dignity? It was after my father-in-law had died that we thought at last of Dylan Thomas’s memorable challenge to his own father. Only then were we able to admire his steadfast refusal to go gentle. As for my father, I’ve learned that he now stands on the shadow-line of a slow decline into dementia. It is from my father that I inherited the gift of words; I expect the words to help me through the loss of my father when neither they nor I can reach him.

            Surely, then, literature could handle the slight disappointment of lost strawberries. Surely I could find a parallel in Proust’s paradis perdus or Milton’s fruitless fruit. But such comfort was not forthcoming. Proust only helps us mourn the pleasures we no longer have, not those we never tasted. Nor does the story of the fall—neither the Hebrews’ strikingly elliptical version nor Milton’s brilliantly embroidered one—offer any help. If only the serpent had dangled the tempting fruit just beyond Eve’s eager reach, then snatched it away—leaving her forever longing and unsatisfied, although in Paradise....

            I was stuck. Not even Wordsworth’s useful cycle of expectation, disappointment, recompense seemed to work here. Certainly the first two stages had been met. And Wordsworth’s tone of mingled joy and regret seemed fitting. Strawberries, one of my purest pleasures, had become oddly tinged with one of my lingering regrets. That in itself didn’t pose a problem: I generally claim to dwell in irony. And I could see the pattern working in other areas of my life. Now in my fifties, I consider regret a necessary by-product of living. I suspect that anyone who reaches this age without some wistfulness lacks either honesty or imagination. The American philosopher Charles Hartshorne wrote that the real tragedy of life is not the necessity of suffering but the necessity of choosing between equal and incompatible goods. To live life, to go here and not there, to make this choice and not that one, is to create the condition for regret.   

            Still, regret has a strange way of generating affirmation. My regret over missing the experience of having a child is matched by my relief at missing the burden of being a parent. Regrets about accepting an academic life over a writing career—and about choosing the relatively slow-paced academic life I lead over the high-powered one I left—are tempered by the sudden, unexpected gratitude of students grown and gone and by my own gratitude for the periods of leisure I’ve enjoyed. Who, among the readers of the glossy magazine I might have written for, would send me a birthday card each year—on his own birthday—to thank me for sharing with him my love of literature? When, on the academic fast track, would I have found time to make a late summer trip to my mother’s childhood home in the tiny Belgian village of Putte Kapellen? Expectation, disappointment, recompense.

            Of course, some regrets have nothing to do with choices, and that brings me back to the strawberries. Where was the recompense in this case? I suppose it’s possible that my earthly pleasures would have been diminished had I tasted from the cup of paradise. But that sounds too much like sour berries. I give up. At least I can find comfort in the annual, seasonal cycle that both brings pleasure and takes it away. I do admit that the strawberries of May are sweetened by the impending blight of July. And on further reflection, another, truer recompense appears. As I write, deep in the haze of late summer, I can look from my study window onto the tired trees and parched grass and beyond them to the struggling vegetable garden. And there I can just make out, among the yellow, drying foliage, the ripe red fruit: our annual, much-anticipated, short-lived harvest of home-grown tomatoes—no larger from here than berries.