July 6: Strawberries

We get many of our summer vegetables from a local farmer, and for a little extra, we can go out to the farm and pick our own strawberries. The bleak, rainy weather of late spring and early summer delayed the berries a few weeks, but now these ripe red jewels are shining from beneath healthy leaves. I picked three quarts today to eat fresh, eating a few as I moved down the rows. The sun beat down, and surrounding the gardens, thick grass waved in fields amid vetch, day lilies, and black-eyed susans. A phoebe watched from the wire fence. Does anything taste more like summer than a sun-warmed, perfectly ripe strawberry?

I like to accessorize to coordinate with my fruit

Here's tonight's dessert:

mouthful of a summer's day--

fruit, garden, fields, sun.