Strawberries, Shortcake and the Shortest Night

The berries come on all at once. For most of the spring they are nothing but green buttons under the leaves, and the leaves are nothing but a low green ridge over dark soil. Then the days lengthen past a certain point and the plants go red almost row by row, as if the field were being lit from underneath. In June the picking is a race against the heat and the birds, and the whole effort of the farm comes down to a stretch of about two weeks.

This is the season's first fruit. In the southern states the crop may already be done before June arrives; the rush comes in May down there, and by the first of the month the patches have gone quiet, the plants already sending out runners for next year. But north of the Mason-Dixon line, June is the month. The fields fill up with people bent over, moving slowly down the rows, calling to one another across the plants.

The best berries hang low, where they have been sheltered from the sun. The rule is to pick the ones that come off in the hand; the stubborn ones are not ready, and they do not ripen after picking. A pale berry carried home in the morning will be a pale berry at supper, so the pickers are careful, twisting the stem and dropping the fruit gently into the basket. Still, the ground is sprinkled with red by the end of the day — the soft ones, the overripe ones, the ones the birds got to first.

The Two-Week Rush

The whole season lasts about two weeks. That is the strangest thing about strawberries, a thing that grows all spring and is gone almost before anyone has had enough. The patch opens on a morning in early June. The first weekend is the busiest. Families come out in the cool of the day, and the rows fill with the sound of small children who eat more than they put in their buckets, and parents who pretend not to notice. The buckets are weighed at a shed by the road. Some people take the berries home and put them up for jam; others eat them in the car, warm, before the car has reached the end of the lane.

There is a particular smell to a strawberry patch in June: overripe fruit, turned earth, and the sharp green of the plants, which is stronger than the berries themselves. It hangs in the air all day. By evening the field is quiet and the pickers are gone, but the smell stays, and with it the sense that something good happened there that the birds and the bees will finish off by morning.

The patches are not farms exactly, not the way a cornfield is a farm. Many are pick-your-own places, a stretch of ground off a county road where the work is done by whoever wants the berries. That is the appeal, and the people who run them know it. They mow the grass between the rows, put out the cardboard boxes, and trust that the families will take more than they leave.

The Longest Day

In the same weeks the light is doing something of its own. The days have been growing longer all spring, and in June they reach their full measure. Around the solstice, the year's longest day, the sun comes up early and stays late, and the shortest night of the year comes and goes almost without being noticed. In the far northern states the dusk stretches so long it seems to meet the dawn, the sky never quite going dark, just deepening to a blue that is still blue at an hour that has no business being blue. People sit outside later than they would ever think to. Supper moves to the porch, then to the yard, then to wherever the light happens to be.

The solstice is not a loud holiday. It has none of the build-up of Thanksgiving or the packed excitement of the Fourth of July. It arrives quietly, on an ordinary weekday, the sun at its very highest while most people are at work. In towns across the country people notice without making much of it. The man next door stands in his yard at nine o'clock with a hose, watering the new grass even though it is still bright. The children are still out, chasing fireflies at the edge of the yard. The longest day is spent on the most ordinary things — but done in the light, which is the whole point.

There is a reason so much of the month's social life happens outdoors. In June the evening is long enough for a whole second day. The work gets done, the supper gets eaten, and there is still light enough for a game in the yard, a walk around the block, a fishing pole leaning off the dock. The grill smoke from one yard drifts into the next, and the next yard sends back its own. The block is one long conversation carried on across fences and driveways, in the blue hour that holds until the fireflies give up.

The Shortcake Table

What June is really for, in most American kitchens, is the first strawberry shortcake. The dessert is simple enough to be a matter of family argument: biscuit or sponge, sweetened cream or barely sweet, berries sugared and left to sit in their own juice. Everyone has an opinion, and the opinion is usually somebody's grandmother's. What nobody argues is the timing. The first shortcake of the season is an occasion — a reason for the family to gather on a Sunday afternoon, for the porch table to be set, for someone to make twice as much as needed.

The berries are sliced into a bowl and sugared, then left alone for an hour. The sugar draws out the juice, which is the whole trick. By the time the biscuits come out of the oven the berries are swimming in a red syrup that tastes like the month itself — sun-warm and faintly grassy, sweet in a way that has nothing to do with sugar. The cream is whipped by hand or poured from a carton, and nobody at the table cares which. It is the kind of meal that ends in quiet, everyone leaning back, the shortest night of the year settling over the yard.

There is something else about the shortcake table: it brings in the people who are not family. The couple from three houses down. The friend from work who could not get home for the holiday. The new neighbor who has never been inside the house. June is a month of open doors. The screen door bangs all evening. The pitcher of tea runs dry and is refilled. The good berries go around twice, and the bowl is tipped at the end for the last of the juice. This is the month's real work, if the month has any — to gather people around the proof that summer has arrived.

The Turn Toward July

After the solstice the change is imperceptible at first. A minute one day, a minute the next, then a little more. Nobody notices for a week or more, which is exactly how it should be. The berries keep coming — the second week of the patch's season, berries a little larger and a little less sweet than the first, as if the plants were stretching before they stopped. The fields stay open as long as the fruit holds, and then one morning the shed is empty and the season is done, the sign at the lane end turned around. The people who came for the first weekend came for the last, and the buckets go home one more time.

But the month's last gift is to hand the summer over. June ends not with a close but with an opening. The gardens are full. The tomatoes are green but on the vine. The corn is knee-high in the fields along the river bottom. The nights are a hair longer, a sliver, and nobody wants to talk about it. The fireflies are still going. The last of the strawberries are in the freezer or in jars, the sugar already drawn, to be opened in January when the taste of this month comes back out of the dark and reminds somebody that the world turns and June comes around again.