Strawberries

“What do you like about hulling strawberries?” my daughter asked as I quickly separated the tiny stems from the almost-too-plump wild fruit.

They were actually the fruits of her labor, she having searched them out, picked them not less than an hour ago, and washed them. She wouldn’t hull them, though. She hadn’t the patience. I knew that.

“It’s a Zen sort of thing,” I said, “It’s a simple task, with a positive outcome. Wild strawberries are a gift from God. Hulling them is like unwrapping the gift. And it’s probably something that’s been done, just like this, since the very beginning of human life.”

“So it puts you in touch with the past?” she queried.

“Sort of.” I said, “It puts me in touch with the basics of humanity.”

“You know,” she observed, “Other animals like the strawberries, too. Ants eat them. In fact, they drill little holes in them. When I see one with a little hole I don’t pick it because...”

She paused, and she being a somewhat finicky teenage girl I fully expected her to say something like “because I don’t want ant spit on my strawberry. Yuck.” But she didn’t. She said:

“...because it means the ants need that strawberry. And I would not take it from them.”

I never thought of it that way. Amazing.
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