Strawberry Thief

Thrushes are songbirds with a truly charming sound. They have brown wings and a white chest speckled with brown spots. Their eyes are round black beads surrounded by a gold ring - seeking out valuable pickings to eat.

Their beak is well suited to puncturing the ground in search of worms and other juicy, muddy meals. Year-round they eat brown and squishy creatures day after day, choking them down whole. This must be why, for one blessed month, they attack strawberries with such fervor.

Ironically, 'thrush' contains the word 'rush', which is exactly how the birds descend into the brambles at the end of June. The jagged leaves flap frantically in tandem with the thrushes' wings in a feasting flurry. They are there for one thing - and one thing only.

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It all starts with a white flower. Small and delicate, it grows among the spiked twiggy-ness of the plant. They poke out from the rough and peek outwards on thick strands only to bloom with silky soft, wide petals; open and beckoning the bees.

In hordes, they arrive. Buzzing at hazy frequencies and laden with pollen, the hairs on their legs get sticky and hot. But they don't stop until the center of the flower begins to swell with the promise of fruit.

Green and sour the berries come. Immature: hard and green they are sour. Satisfying for those thrushes willing to tolerate the dry crunch. Still, it must make a nice break from slippery snails and worms - to simply eat without the presence of wiggling down the throat.

Oh, that patient one, who waits for the red. They watch the skin turn soft and velvety, with a uniform scattering of seeds on the surface of each. Finally, they plunge their beak through the flesh. That thrush doesn't rush, but they have their reward.

Juicy Strawberries

So juicy that, if a beak could salivate, it would be sopping wet at the thought of the burst of sweetness that breaks open against the tongue when the skin cracks. Beak and tongue as they are - painted in sticky red and dripping with sugar. It must be akin to drinking a mouthful of the crispest, cleanest water known to mother earth. Not only that but on the most radiant of days, where the air is thick with pollen and the temperature burning hot. Imagine that, gulping down the cold center of a strawberry on a day so relentlessly suffocating and feeling the frigid trail slip down to cool the stomach - divine.

I like to imagine these flurries of activity in strawberry patches as the bird equivalent to a family barbecue. They gather under a shady canopy, escaping the sun, to eat a refreshing salad with one another. They sing akin to the chatting of a family too, sharing gossip and stories from the past year over their meal.

William Morris captures the beauty of these heist masters in his textile pattern - The Strawberry Thief. The brown birds sing with c-shaped beaks among the white flowers and green strawberry buds. They hop on fabric depictions of symmetrical roughage - dark green.

To make the blue color for some of the birds' wings and leaves to highlight the green, Morris used indigo dye but pretreated the fabric with bleach to reach the desired blue color. A beautiful eggshell blue that fits perfectly with the thrushes' own egg color.

Indeed, even the repetition of the textile pattern echos the strawberry feast ritual. How beautiful.

I ask you, dear reader, to take a moment to truly look into this textile pattern. It captures nature so wonderfully.

To think, we can watch exactly what he captured 139 years ago in fabric, just outside our windows in my strawberry patches -an honor.

A/N: Gosh, I loved this prompt. It's out of my comfort zone to write but I felt the opportunity to share this beautiful and unique piece of art too valuable!

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