When you hike in Cape Breton, and come across wild strawberries, the succulent kind, the kind that drop off the stem, you eat them. You don’t bring them home and wash them and fuss. You pick until you have a healthy palm-full, and then you munch as you walk.
You don’t worry about dust or dirt. You don’t think about bugs or spiders or acid rain, and you certainly don’t dwell on dog pee or moose droppings. You eat them, one at a time the way they should be enjoyed.
The flavour, the indescribable sweetness, will bring you back to strawberry festivals in church halls, fiddle music and bonfires on the beach. You’ll suddenly remember blueberries on the fields of the Radar Station or blackberries as big as plums nestled in waist-high branches of gnarled thorns. You’ll see the silver backs of smelts caught with your grandfather under the spotlight of a giant moon. You’ll feel the pull of a speckled trout on a rod arched like a back of a scared cat.
You’ll remember lobster boils and periwinkles steamed in an old tin can. You’ll snap lilacs from your grandmother’s backyard bushes and see Fat Archies and cloverleaf rolls lining her counters like a mountain range. The next thing you know you’re on your way to Boisdale for a Boxing Day party.
Cape Breton’s wild strawberries have power—don’t mess with it.
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