It’s raining, and I’m eating strawberries. It's early for rain, and it's early to be eating strawberries. They’re not in season. It was hard to find a container that didn’t have some severe squishy going on, but I’m eating them. With just a little sugar.
This tastes like memory to me. It tastes like dessert after Easter dinner at my grandmother’s house. Fluffy white meringues of Schaum Torte. Even fluffier peaks of whipping cream and the decadent brilliance of strawberries out of season.
Red juices running over the clear glass plates that Grandma brought out, only for Schaum Torte. The plates are shaped sort of like peaches and are completely appropriate for the inexact shape of the mound of white meringue. A round plate would have made the tortes look sloppy.
By the end of dessert, the sludge on my plate is pink. The meringue isn’t crisp anymore, but I’ve eaten all the strawberries.
I remember strawberries as a luxury. This is possibly a slightly modified memory, but I feel like they were something to be eaten only in season when the prices were down or as my neighbor's freezer jam later in the summer.
And so eating them at my desk for no apparent reason, while reading an exquisitely crafted book, watching the early not-yet-spring rain happen, feels like a nap in a sunbeam. I'm stretched full length in it, a happy, warm cat.
