I don't know if they're the same wild strawberries whose extremely fragile flesh held Russ Parsons (author of How to Pick a Peach) agonizing here, but there is a reliable patch of wild strawberries in the back of my parents' house. (I'm not disclosing its location, because they're all mine!) When I found the patch during the first summer in Chicago four years ago, I was crazy with joy. I couldn't believe I could pick wild, and even better yet, edible, strawberries just a few steps from home. Since then, my mom and I have picked these tender delicacies every summer. Perhaps because they're so tiny, these wild berries are much more densely sweet and aromatic than the huge Drisxxl strawberries.

This year, I'd been procrastinating the strawberry hunt. There were two things against this annual event: the aggressive blackbirds and omnipresent cicadas. Along the marshy area behind the strawberry patch, the blackbirds (red-winged blackbirds) nest in the reeds. Their breeding season, rather annoyingly, is just about the same as the height of the strawberry season. When I go out for a strawberry hunt, therefore, I have to duck the pissy blackbirds that dart straight toward my face from their high vantage point on the power lines. They don't actually try to peck me, but they are very good at scaring me away from their young ones (and those juicy strawberries).

And this year, there were cicadas. In Glenview (where my parents live), the cicadas were everywhere. The whole forests were pulsing with their sounds--sort of like a million wind-up toys released at the same time. The sidewalks were strewn with their crunchy shells and crunchy carcases, forcing everyone to tiptoe to avoid them. In forest preserves, dozens of stray cicadas flew into the face of anyone who ventured in. I imagined the little grove by the strawberry patch to be quite the same, and was reluctant to get near it. So, I'd delayed the strawberry hunt till today.

On the way to the strawberry patch.

As I'd been suspected, it was a bit too late for the height of the strawberry season, but there was a few late bloomers left. The fun of strawberry hunt, at least in my patch (note the unwarranted possessive!), is that I have to sort of comb through the other plants to find the tiny, ruby-colored fruits dangling just a few inches above ground. My eyes take some time to get re-attuned to the scenery. At first, I don't see any berries at all. All I see is a sea of leaves. What catches my eyes are the reddened tips of the strawberry leaves. After a while, I see a cluster. It is when I kneel on the ground that the tiny red berries start to burst into my visual consciousness. Where I didn't see anything but stalks of grass and leaves of ox-eye daisies, now I see strawberries. Because it was later in the season, much of the berries have already ripened and fallen to the ground, and many of the ones still on the vine had started to dry out. (These "naturally dried" strawberries were pretty tasty, actually.) The entire area, as I crouched on the ground, exuded an overwhelmingly sweet fragrance, probably from the overripe, half-rotting berries on the ground. It was almost like smelling a huge pot of perfect strawberries slowly cooking on a confectioner's stove.

This year's bounty.

I gathered a small bowlful and went home. (The butterflies were becoming bothersome.) As Russ Parsons lamented in the above article (he ordered a package of wild strawberries across the country, which arrived as a pool of mushy strawberry juice--even with layers of protection that the producer of the fruits carefully placed around the berries), my wild strawberries showed signs of their fragility. After only about twenty minutes of sitting in a plastic bag, many of them had smashed surface and their precious juice had stained the inside of the bag. I rinsed them quickly, removed the stems, and contemplated what to do with them.

Update: I (predictably) made a tiny quantity of strawberry jam. Being about a tablespoonful, it disappeared in a blink of an eye!