The Strawberry Refresher
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
By Jesse Curran
The essence of a gift is that it creates a set of
relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its
root, reciprocity.
-Robin Wall Kimmerer (28)
I try my first Strawberry Refresher with Leona at the mall. It’s her first too. Her brother and dad are away for a couple days and we’re having a “girls’ weekend.” Leona gets to choose what we do. So, here we are on a Saturday afternoon in a crowded Starbucks in a pretentious consumer hellscape and I’m moody and broody from long lines and packed parking lots. But here’s my girl, delighted with her cake pop and the fact that we’re actually at the mall, drinking the wonder-woman’s drink. I’m doing my best not to pontificate on capitalist ruin and reveal how despondent the place makes me feel. I recall that this very same mall was a dream destination for me too, back in 1990, though what made me excited– the book store and toy store and arcade games–are long gone.
The wonder-woman is Leona’s third grade teacher, Mrs. Long. Leona loves the Strawberry Refresher because she loves Mrs. Long, who treats herself every day to this very same drink. Some days, according to Leona’s report, Mrs. Long has two. Leona’s been wanting to try one, to emulate her beautiful teacher, so despite the sugar and mild caffeine, here we are. I have to admit, overlooking the price tag, it’s not too bad. Indeed, other than this time with my daughter, it’s the best part of the mall trip.
In the incomparable classic that is Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s chapter on the wild strawberry models the grace and wisdom of her metaphorical braid. I often use this chapter in my literary analysis class to teach metaphorical thinking, a practice vital to ecological in that it is a vehicle of interrelation. In my beat-up paperback copy, just about every sentence is starred or underlined or bracketed with “!!” expressing my affection for this utter delight of a piece of writing. I’m also immensely grateful for Kimmerer, who has been a teacher for me through space and time. I always feel cared for when I read her work—reassured of literature’s role in nurturing belonging in the biotic community. Her values are the ones I want to hold; the connections between science and poetry speak a clear line of truth that grounds me in an otherwise rocky world. Her focus is often on alternative economies of generosity, reciprocity, and gratitude. A starkly different world that Johhny Was, “affordable luxury,” that just seems excessive and silly and to traffic in perpetuating feelings of artificial aesthetics and body insecurity.
In Potawatomi, the strawberry is ode min, the heart berry. We recognize them as the leaders of the berries, the first to bear fruit. Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet (23).
On back-to-school night, I find myself tickled by Mrs. Long’s humor and am surprised to feel so kindled by her passion. Sitting at my daughter’s desk for a half hour or so, I’m chuckling and amused. I could see how my girl had been enraptured. I leave the elementary school that Tuesday night in mid-September thinking how Mrs. Long is a teacher’s teacher. A teacher other teachers notice as a good teacher. I sense she’s not just in it for the summer’s off, but is a teacher because of some deep-rooted joy and that allows her to create a genuine sense of belonging in the classroom. She’s here, at least in part, due to some zeal for the performance and play. And this vibrancy is contagious.
It’s been my daughter’s best school year since preschool, before the pandemic, before we all felt a strain in the household and waves of opposition and defiance and resistance to the very idea of school. Yet here’s Mrs. Long telling us how wonderful Leona is doing. At her conference she smiles and says, she’s a great girl! And Leona doesn’t want to miss school when she’s sick and she’s eager to see what’s ahead each day. It’s as if Mrs. Long’s classroom is a wild strawberry patch and Leona comes home each day having feasted, berry juice dripping down her chin.
For teacher appreciation day, my co-class parent and I decorate Mrs. L’s door with strawberries and streamers and cut-out letters that say the berry best. We leave her a strawberry gift bag with some stationary adorned with strawberries and a gift card to Starbucks. It’s a bit of a gag—a hyperbolic explosion of appreciation framed as a field of strawberries. More stuff in a world of stuff. But it’s cute and I find myself eager to do it—to do something. In the strawberry notecard we include with the present, I write with my pink pen: you are a gift. My gratitude for the school year is expansive.
Kimmerer explains that recognizing something as a gift encourages the necessary response of gratitude. I’m grateful my daughter has an experience of excitement in the classroom. Sure, it’s great that she’s learning to read and how fractions connect to division. But more importantly, I’m grateful that she feels a sense of love. I’m grateful that school is exciting. And so, we sip our Strawberry Refreshers and chat about the funny things Mrs. Long does—how she loves the “Multiplication around the World” game and likes going out for pizza on Friday lunch with her fellow teachers. I can forget that just a year or two ago, my husband sometimes had to physically carry her into the school building, depositing her with the greeter, who escorted her late to class.
What I mean of course is that our human relationship with strawberries is transformed by our choice of perspective. It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. (30)
Leona is my June baby—born on the sixteenth day of the sixth month, sixteen days after her due date. So much waiting, such a gift after a hard and long and strong labor, the oxytocin imploding my cells. For the first months of nursing her, every time the milk let down, I would have flashbacks to the times in my life when I had fallen in love. Since that June afternoon when she emerged from my body, she has been a gift, even as she challenges us in just about every way, leaving us ever-exploring diagnostic lines between oppositional defiance and strong will and passion. Sometimes, she is a tornado in the house. The lightning bolt flashing across my sky. When she strikes out at softball, I pray she doesn’t throw her bat in a rage. It’s not always easy to know whom she’ll take to—and who will take to her. Her passion is never quiet and her big feelings are expressive and sometimes unpredictable, though we’ve learned to channel them into paint and clay and black sharpies on white paper.
At a recent faculty senate meeting for my university, there are rumors of SUNY General Ed requirements being taught through A.I. Just a rumor, but one wonders what’s next amidst the fiscal crises and the ongoing attack on the liberal arts. Yes, take all the things that matter and let the robots do the work. Course maps, learning outcomes, learning objectives, materials, assessments. The robots can work those all up. I wonder though if they can make jokes like Mrs. Long does—if they can read the room and find ways of focusing young minds that are increasingly distracted. I wonder if students will come to school simply because their teacher’s laughter lights up their hearts. I wonder if the robots like Strawberry Refreshers?
It’s the end of May and the local strawberries are starting to ripen. Leona knows the end of the school year looms and with that comes the loss of Mrs. Long. I’m also apprehensive of what next year will bring; I feel my old worry creep in. What if Leona decides next year’s teacher just isn’t so good? What if she doesn’t crack jokes and think the students are just the best? What if next year’s teacher, like me, drinks strong coffee with no sugar? What if there’s no substitute for the Strawberry Refresher?
Perhaps there’s no escape from such apprehension, the currents of change that pull us along as we parent children in a time of political and environmental instability. For me, it’s often the collision with the mall and supermarket that feels most bewildering. These days, I buy non-organic strawberries because I just can’t seem to easily find organic ones—and at the end of the day, I’ve decided it’s better to eat strawberries than processed crap. Strawberries, the famed crown jewel of the dirty dozen, the soft skins saturated with pesticides. For a few years we had the most riotous patch in the backyard that would yield bowls of berries every spring. Last summer, we paved the paradisiacal patch and put in a pool. And such are the double-binds; the paradoxes of parenting. Always questioning what’s the right action. Always running away from some fear and toward some other apprehension. I think of the famous Buddhist parable about the woman running away from tigers. As Pema Chodron retells it in The Wisdom of No Escape,
She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there. She climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass, so she looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly (26).
How easy it was to retreat from the world before children. To rule out plastic. To not buy crap. To never go to Starbucks. To spend the afternoon driving a few towns over to source organic berries. To prioritize the berry patch over the pool. Somedays I feel myself drowning in it all. But I’m learning, with Kimmerer as my teacher, to take a walk in the world and to see what it presents. I look at my daughter, so strong and alive in her fierceness and with her fire. She delights in her Refresher and our chat, where I tell her about my third-grade teacher, who was a bit witchy. She’s tickled by my memories. I feel myself falling in love with her again.
I think of the end of Ellen Bass’ poem “Relax,” where she retells the famed parable. Relax, I tell myself, the only thing at the mall that can save me is sitting in front of me.
Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.
There’s nothing like a strawberry to bring one fully into the present. I savor these moments with my girl, the tiny seeds crunching between my teeth. And while the Strawberry Refresher we sip on is a far cry from the wild strawberry one might find in a woodland ecosystem, some small thread of connection seems illuminated. Just as strawberries are a gift, so too, are good teachers. Mrs. Long, fueled by Strawberry Refreshers, is a bit of a strawberry herself. A gift that our family got assigned—a gift to our community. Sweet, fleeting, formative—beautiful and singular—most likely unaware of the range of her reach.
And then there’s Leona, my wild berry, born in the heart of June. I’m the woman, running from all my fear and grief and shame. She is my strawberry—teaching me to live in the present. And so too are the teachers of the world who love us and we seek to please, if only to dwell in the circle of their delight. Oh, how sweet and tart the red juice is.
Works Cited
Bass, Ellen. Like a Beggar. Copper Canyon Press, 2014.
Chodron, Pema. The Wisdom of No Escape. Shambhala, 2018.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
