On the Tip of My Tongue

What does summer taste like? Is it sticky, multi-colored popsicles? Or gushy, still-melting and yet crunchy crumbling smore's? Does it taste like the watermelon you ate on the porch with your siblings when you were twelve? Maybe something savory on the stove-top that was worth the way it made the season's heat unbearable? I don't know. I thought about it for so many days and couldn't quite decide until I stood before the unforgiving light and subtle judgement of a fridge open too long. Then I had my answer as my eyes rested on the inconveniently tall red-and-white pressurized containment device labeled: Heavy Whipped Cream.

Strawberries are the taste of summer.

How could they not be? The strawberry plant bears fruit in mid-late summer; except for the ever-bearing varietes, which can hypothetically produce year round unless you accidentally kill them. Haha, whoops. But whether one can grow strawberries succesfully or not, the point remains that they represent the height of summer in a way that no other food does. They bear fruit at the crux of the season, at the point when one realizes that summer will come to an end; at the point which is most bitter-sweet, before the gradual descent into autumn.

The miserable heat of summer is enough to make a person beg for a sudden snow-storm, but when actually faced with the loss of the lush greens and warmth we pause. And there it is. Steady and red on the table, a bowl of fresh cut strawberries, sprinkled with sugar and crowned with whipped cream. What a vibrant red, intense and warm. As if to offer comfort to your soul; to say that it's okay if the seasons change.

Don't worry about fall, or the sleepy winter that will follow.

Only today matters. Only this moment. I am here now, says the strawberry.

All silliness of anthropomorphizing a fruit aside, it's the strawberry that makes me think of summer. The modern world is quite amazing, in that we can simply buy strawberries in any season if we wish. Once there was a time when the seasonality of things mattered more, a time before comercial greenhouses and motorized transport. However, you can take the berry out of the season, but you can't take the season out of the berry. The best strawberries will always be the first flush of their natural season.

In those heavy summer months, when they first bloom and bear fruit; those are the highest quality strawberries. The plant may continue to bloom and produce, but the most energy went into the production of those that came first. Summer tastes like that bowl of tart-sweet juicy fruits, richly flavored and practically begging to be dessert, or second dessert, or breakfest, or part of a salad, etc. I think you get my point.

As I considered flavors that I asscosiate with summer, it was mostly those things that we half-taste. Those flavors that are born from strong scents and accidental mouthfuls like chlorine and cut grass, or the earth after it rains, or fire-pit smoke. For fear of making it sound like I ingest fireworks, I certainly couldn't say "Summer tastes like gunpowder" now could I? More than any taste, the scent of thunderstorms on my tongue reminds me of summer. The much less pleasant scent of wet dogs reminds me of summer. The scent of scorched dirt when the rain subsides. The taste of vapor-thick air. Of the salty sweat above my lips.

But if I must chose something traditionally edible, then I can only choose strawberries. For there is no other plant that I tie so closely to the season in my mind; no other plant I am so keen to reach for in the garden-center of a store; no other fruit I am so desirous of in the summer months, than the strawberry.