This foolish essay about berries that mean love to me is only partly inspired by the Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That’s because, of course, their song was only about meditating. In the lyrics they take you to the “Strawberry Fields where nothing is real… but it’s nothing to get hung up about…” They are talking about a blissful place of no worries where we all need to go. And then staying there forever.
This, of course, I could never do. Worrying about the future is tattooed on my behavioral imperatives in the dark part of my stupid old brain. And while I often found that place of no worries, and lingered there for a bit, I found you could never really get anything done if you stayed in that state of strawberry fields forever.
But don’t get me wrong, strawberries are a critical part of every healthy mental diet.
You see, my meditations on strawberries when I was a child of eight, nine, and ten centered on the strawberry patch at Great Grandma Hinckley’s place.
She was, as I incorrectly recall, slightly older than Jesus when I was that age. By that I mean, though she seemed museum-quality ancient to me, I had derived wisdom about life, love, and laughter from her before Sunday School taught me any of those things said in Jesus’s words.
And I was given the task of mowing her lawn in the little plot of land surrounding her little, tiny house in the Northern part of Rowan where I also lived and grew and celebrated Christmas and Halloween and Easter and the 4th of July. And though I was doing it because she was so old, I never even once thought she was too old and frail to do it herself. Grandma Hinckley’s willpower was a force of nature that could even quell tornados… well, I thought so anyway when I was eight. And she gave me a dollar every time I did the lawnmowing.
But there were other things she wanted done, and other things she wanted to teach me. There was the garden out back with the strawberry patch next to it. She wanted me to help with keeping the weeds and the saw grass and the creeping Charlie from overrunning the strawberries and choking them to death. (Creeping Charlie wasn’t an evil neighbor, by the way. He was a little round-leafed weed that grew so profusely that it prevented other plants from getting any sunlight on their own leaves, causing a withering, yellowing death by sunlight deprivation. I took my trowel to them and treated them like murderers. I showed them no mercy.)
And Grandma always reminded me not to be selfish and eat the very berries I was tending in the garden. She taught me that eating green strawberries (which are actually more yellow than green, but you know what I mean) was bad because they could give you a belly ache, a fact that that I proved to myself more than once (because eight-year-olds are stupid and learn slowly.) She also taught me that it is better to wait until you have enough strawberries to make a pie, or better yet, strawberry shortcake with whipped cream. She taught me that delayed gratification was more rewarding in the long run than being greedy in the short run and spoiling everything for everybody.
She always gave me a few of the ripe strawberries every time I helped her with them, even if I had eaten a few in the garden without permission. Strawberries were the fruit of true love. I know this because it says so in the strawberry picture. Even though I probably never figured out what true love really means.
My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was the foundation stone that my mother’s side of the family was built on. She was the rock that held us steadily in place during the thunderstorms, and the matriarch of the entire clan of Hinckleys and Aldriches and Beyers and other cousins by the dozens and grandchildren and great grandchildren and even great great grandchildren. I painted the picture of her in 1980 when she passed away. I gave it to my Grandma Aldrich, her second-eldest daughter. It spent three decades in Grandma’s upstairs closet because looking at it made Grandma too sad to be so long without her. The great grandchild in the picture with her is now a grandmother herself (though no one who has seen this picture knows who it is supposed to be because I painted her solely from memory and got it all wrong.) But Grandma Hinckley taught me what true love means. And true love has everything to do with how you go about taking care of the strawberry patch.
Yes, I am old. I am not merely feeling old as school teachers do at the end of a school day, I am retired, I am on Medicare, and I am literally an old man. I am even old enough and mature enough to know what the word “literally” actually means and use it correctly in a sentence.
I don’t hear things as well as I used to. I don’t see as well as I once did. Being partially red and green colorblind, I don’t see colors as vividly as I used to. I have learned why old goobers like me let their glasses ride low over their nose. You can look over your glasses at the things around you that you don’t really want to see.
As an author of highly imaginative nonsense, I am really beginning to understand why “dirty old man” jokes are a thing. Writing a fairy story has led me to draw and write about a bunch of nude fairies. It isn’t really so much a sexual-perversion thing as it is a memory of and a longing for something that I no longer have in my life. It’s also the same sort of mental quirkiness as the “being a nudist” thing. I am not interested in the ugly pornographic sort of things, more the innocent, pristine, and long-gone things of youth.
And I see things that I know aren’t really there. Eyes staring at me from the bushes at night. Fairies flitting around the autumn leaves on bug wings. The back half of a ghost dog walking out the back door of the house even though the door isn’t open. I would doubt that I have ever seen a UFO if it weren’t for the fact that I was younger for the first two and my eldest son was with me and saw the third one too.
So, I admit that I have become a crazy old coot. But the best thing about being an old coot is the fact that I have earned it. I worked hard for a lifetime. I taught English competently for thirty-one years. I successfully raised three kids to adulthood. I have been a stable and useful part of society for more than forty years. So, I earned my crazy old cootishness. And I mean to enjoy it while I still have it.
You see, gooseberries aren’t made from geese. They don’t look like gooses… er, goosei… um, geese. They aren’t the favorite food of a goose, unless, maybe… Mother Goose. The name is a corrupted form of the Dutch word kruisbes , or possibly the German Krausbeere. You know, because people who speak English don’t know how to talk right. They don’t have anything to do with geese. In the same way, a person’s name doesn’t really help you understand the person that wears it. You have to dig deeper. Do you know, I have never actually tasted gooseberry pie? I have seen and even picked the gooseberries. They are danged ugly, spikey-furred snot-green berries. I am not tempted in any way to put one in my mouth. And yet, I should not judge gooseberry pie before I taste a piece. I know people who adore gooseberry pie. Maybe you are one of them.
The point is, blogs are exactly the same thing. An artist, a writer, a producer of something, or a day-dreamy noodling goober has put together a blog to display their wares, show off their creations, and share their words and wisdom. You have to look at them, warts and all, and actually take a bite. You have to try them out and test them. Follow them over time. Read, absorb, and appreciate… not merely zoom through and look at the pictures… and maybe click “like” at the bottom of the post.
Of course, I admit, I do the very thing I am advising you not to do. The first few times I visit a blog, I scan through and only focus on a few things that catch my falling stars. (oop! Shame on me… I should say “catch my fancy”. Forgive me for lapsing into Mickian brain farts for a moment there). But if I am lured into coming back, I dip deeper and read more… tasting it thoroughly, as it were… And much of what I taste there will end up in my own recipe somewhere down the line. I begin to learn who that blogger is, and their writing style… sometimes even their thinking style (though I don’t read minds… only smell brain farts and odoriferous mental cooking smells) and I picture them as people in my minds eye. Sometimes I wonder if they match in real life the person I am picturing. Of course, the answer is no. People don’t look like what you think they should look like. They don’t even look like what they think they look like either… even in photos. So let me end this goofy pie-based argument about why blogs are self portraits with a few self portraits I have created that aren’t really what I look like , even if it is a photo.
Me in the mirror, 1980
Scary pictures of the artist as a creepy old man…
The novelist me…
A wizard selfie taken at Mad Ludwig’s Castle in Bavaria.
Who I am and who I was…
Seriously grumpy me…
Gag! Enough of the gooseberries already! Or are they gross-berries? I think that I really don’t look anything like me anymore.
I could tell when Master Eli handed me the bottle imp that used to be my friend Kack, that Kack was no longer trapped in a severed head. He was now a free-floating intelligent smoke trapped in a bottle made of some Slow-One’s special substance. It was not real magic because it did not make my magic-sense tingle. It was some kind of trick with Slow-One chemicals.
“So, Miss Derfentwinkle, tell us about yourself. And keep in mind your “Horrible Poop” friend will now tell us instantly if you are telling a lie.” Master Eli was looking at me with one eye opened wider than the other.
“Yeah, um… I am Derfentwinkle. I am the servant of an evil necromancer.”
“Do you like working for a necromancer?” Bob, the quiet boy, said.
“I hate it. I hate Kronomarke. He’s cruel, and he sent me on a suicide mission to get me killed intentionally.”
I swirled Kack around in his bottle.
“That is perfectly true… every word,” said Kack.
“Do you like me?” asked the weird mouse-boy.
“I find you mildly disgusting, but it was entertaining when Bob knocked you out.”
The quiet boy chuckled softly when I said that. I am not sure, but I think Master Eli did too.
“Would you be willing to betray your former master?” Master Eli asked.
“I would do so quickly and efficiently and deeply enjoy it.”
Master Eli grinned at me at that answer.
“So, is that true too, Kackenfurchtbar?” asked Bob.
“Derfie almost never tells a lie, but, sadly… this is not entirely honest.”
“What? You won’t really betray him?”
“She can’t. People she loves have their lives in his evil hands. But her heart is set against the necromancer, and she would betray him happily if she could.”
“Ah, I expected as much from old Bluebottom,” said Master Eli.
“So, are you going to kill me, then?” I asked, feeling doomed.
“Oh, no. Of course not. But I am not going to let you go either. You belong to me now. I expect I will hang onto you for a few years now.”
“As a sex slave?” asked the mouse-boy with an ugly smirk on his mouse-face.
“No. She’s free to fall in love with you, Mickey. But she’s also allowed to hate you if that’s how she really feels.”
The mouse-boy hung his stupid mouse head in shame at that reproach.
“Tell me, young lady, do know any of the spells used by your former master?”
“I don’t think I have any magical skills, and I know I don’t know any spells.”
“Not completely true,” blurted Kack.
I gave the bottle a violent shake. His floating eyeballs bounced off each other in the smoke.
“You probably know a lot more than you realize,” said Master Eli. “I heard those two crows claim to be your familiars. Not fairy-sized birds, but normal-sized crows. That takes a lot more real magic than you should be capable of.” He was grinning at me even more now.
“Does your evil master know about the crow familiars?” asked quiet Bob.
“I just found out myself. I don’t think he knows. But I’m sure Kack will tell you I’m lying about that too.”
“She is not lying about any of that,” Kack said. So, I gave him another violent shake.
“Wait a minute,” said the mouse-boy. “Why does she get a familiar when you, me, and Bob don’t, Master Eli?”
“Well, Mickey, a wizard is different than a sorcerer.”
I immediately thought a lecture was coming on. Something about wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers makes them want to explain every little detail in one long-winded speech.
“Wizards, you see, are different than we are. They get their magic from books and scrolls and head-knowledge. They have to study to get their magic working. They have evolved the ability to have so much head-knowledge that they eventually need another head to put it in. Thus, their minds invade and meld with an animal familiar, usually a fairy cat, fairy bird, spider, or some other fsairy-sized creature. I have never known a fairy wizard to have a full-sized animal familiar that was bigger than they were.”
I totally nailed it about the lecture thing. This guy was just as boring as old Kronomarke. Except he wore bright red smart-guy robes which were much more interesting than Kronomarke’s usual black robes.
“So, why don’t sorcerers have familiars?” genius mouse-boy just had to ask.
“Because our magic is different. Our magic is not head-knowledge. It is more from the gut. Intuition over intelligence. We pull magic out of our passions, our feelings, our natural insights…”
“Our sexual abilities?” mouse-boy attempted to add.
“No, Mickey. And that kind of thinking can get you killed around a necromancer. Derfentwinkle’s magic comes from a wizarding-way that draws on life and death. She may know Succubus spells that can drain the lifeforce out of you and leave you a withered husk.”
Dang! There went any chance to use that trick! Mouse-boy might not get it, but Bob just learned what to look out for, and he didn’t seem to miss anything that was said.
“So, you still haven’t said why we don’t have no familiars?”
“Ah, Mickey. Such a stupid child. At least you were bright enough to put on pants this morning.”
“He is right, though, Master. You still haven’t explained why…” Bob said.
“Ah, yes. Although you would be smarter with pants on, Bob, you are right. Sorcerers don’t need familiars. They draw spell energy directly from the ether, and don’t pass it through the brain of any creature. Not even their own brain. They apply it directly to the target. That’s why we use wands and staves and such rather than saying a lot of spell words and wiggling our fingers.”
“Oh. Thank you master. That was a very useful lesson,” Bob said with a cute little smile.
“So, Derfentwinkle, has your master shown you any spells, or made you read any books?” Master Eli asked me.
“No. Of course not. All the magic he gave me was inside Kack’s stupid little demon head.”
“She’s not telling you the whole truth. She has seen the Evil Master cast spells and heard the words he used to do them. And she read some of the books over the Evil Master’s shoulder.”
“Thank you, Kack. I wanted them to know that, but I couldn’t tell them because of one of Kronomarke’s spells.”
“She is telling the truth about that.”
Master Eli’s face split with a huge grin. “Very good, then. I think it is about time I employed the Magic Hat.”
I had no idea what that meant. But I knew it might be dreadful.
When conservative cultural warriors, Twitter Trolls, or dyspeptic gasbags like Rush Limbaugh call you a “Special Snowflake”, I have discovered, to my chagrin, that they don’t mean it as a compliment. In their self-centered, egotistical world you have to be as emotionally tough and able to “take it” as they believe (somewhat erroneously to my way of thinking) they themselves are. They have no time for political correctness, safe spaces, or, apparently, manners polite enough not to get you killed on the mean streets where they never go. Being a retired school teacher who was once in charge of fragile young psyches trying to negotiate a cruel Darwinian world, I think I disagree with them.
Have you ever tried to draw a snowflake? Believe me, it is difficult. Snowflakes are hexagonal star-shapes with enough lace and filigrees in them to make it a nightmare to draw it with painfully arthritic hands. The one above took me an hour with ruler and compass and colored pencils, and it still doesn’t look as good as a first grader can create with scissors and folded paper. Much better to use a computer program to spit them out with mathematical precision and fractal beauty. That’s how all the tiny ones in the background were created. But even a computer can’t recreate the fragile, complicated beauty of real snowflakes.
You see how the fragile crystalline structures will break in spots, melt in spots, attach to others, and get warped or misshapen? That is the reason no two snowflakes are alike, even though they all come from the same basic mathematically precise patterns generated by ice crystals. Life changes each one in a different way.
And that, of course, is the reason this essay is really about people rather than mere physical artifacts of cold weather. Our fragilities and frailties are earned, and they make us who we are. I have a squinky eye like Popeye from playing baseball and getting hit by a pitch. I have a big toe that won’t bend from playing football. They both represent mistakes that I learned from the hard way.
As a teacher, I learned that bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders are very real things. I lost a job once to one of those. And I spent a long night talking someone out of suicide one horrible December. Forgive me, I had to take fifteen minutes just there to cry again. I guess I am just a “special snowflake”. But the point is, those things are real. People really are destroyed by them sometimes. And they deserve any effort I can make to protect them or help them make it through the night.
But people are like snowflakes. They are all complex. They are all beautiful in some way. They are all different. No two are exactly the same.
And I really think boorish bastards have no right to insist that we need to take safe spaces and sanctuaries away from them. Every snowflake has worth. Winter snow leaves moisture for seedlings to get their start every spring. If you are a farmer, you should know this and appreciate snowflakes. And snowflakes can be fascinating. Even goofy ones like me.
There are definitely tendencies in those of us who are really atheists and non-believers in our heads to look back fondly at a time when God and religion filled our childish hearts every Sunday Morning. I have been told that idiots like me with a penchant for writing humor ought not to indulge in making fun of religion and politics. But I look at modern humorists making fun of both those things with impunity and too often end up admiring their success. Because, not only does the the subject of religion provide an easy target for satire and mockery, but we can’t really keep something sacred in our porcelain and breakable human hearts for very long without making sure it is fire-tested. That’s why I intend to take a flame-thrower to it in today’s Sunday Sermon. And I don’t mean I will only make fun of belief in God, but making fun of belief in atheism as well.
Here is a piece of music that gives your heart peace that you might need to play in the background if you really plan to read this purple-paisley-prose post. It is Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, a very spiritual piece to play for peace of personhood and a pinch of paradise.
Now, of course, the first thing to acknowledge in this idiot’s Sunday sermon is the idea of God Himself.
Is there a God?
Remember, I pass the test for believing what atheists normally believe. That should disqualify me from making the following statement. But remember too, I also identified myself in this essay as an idiot. So, I will say it anyway.
There is a God, not in Heaven, but in us. There has to be. I talk to Him all the time, and He answers me. And I keep asking Him, “If you don’t exist, then how can you be answering me?”
“Well, Michael, you are an idiot. And things don’t have to make sense for you to believe them. But also, I am the part of you that never gives up on you even when you have given up on yourself.”
And I try to look as intelligent as I can as I say, “What…?”
“People, Mickey, my son, have a secret power inside of themselves that, when they are in troubled times and dire dangers, they can reach deep into their souls for it and pull it out to save themselves from the situation in the best way possible.”
“So, if people use this power correctly, say the right words and everything, they can save their lives in any situation and even live on after death?”
“I know you are an idiot, my child, but try not to be quite so idiotic all the time.”
“But people who are very religious believe in eternal life of some kind, don’t they?”
“You are not the only idiot out there, my beloved.”
“So, we don’t get eternal life for praying the right things and doing the right things and fulfilling all the elements of the Live Forever Spell?”
“There is no such thing as eternal life nor eternal torment. But you exist. And existence is eternal. There was no life before you are born, and there is no life after you die. But once you exist, you always exist, even outside of the time-frame of your mortal life.”
“That’s why I call myself a Christian Existentialist, right?”
“You are, indeed, that flavor of idiot, yes. But the Christian part means you have to adhere to Christian values. And not the ones Christian Fundamentalist idiots interpret from the Old Testament. The real ones based on choosing love over hate.”
“So, is that all I need to bring this sermon to an end?”
“Well, you should probably thank William Bouguereau for providing most of the internet images you illustrated this thing with. He died before you were born, but he still exists.”
“Thanks, Billy B. You paint lovely naked angels.”
“And you should recognize that this idiotic thing you have written is not a sermon, but, rather, a fantasy dialogue. And then stop adding more to it like a good little idiot.”
If I look for the essential action shots in my art to find pictures that illustrate “Adventure” I am frustrated to find that I am much more a maker of static portraits than comic book action scenes.
I am a captive today. I went to Denton, Texas yesterday to receive my booster dose of the Covid vaccine. I don’t feel any worse than the last two times I got vaccinated. But I am not better either.
And there are two big court cases happening today that have a huge effect on whether life is going to be fair to us rabbit-people, or will end up being more fair to those FOX people.
Three knuckle-dragging crackers hunted down an unarmed black man with guns in Georgia, claiming he was a theft suspect. They repeatedly threatened to kill him if he didn’t surrender to them, and then they finally carried out the threat and shot him dead. And yesterday I heard the main cracker make the excuse that the man tried to grab his gun, so he shot him to death in self-defense.
One Rambo wannabe in Wisconsin, a seventeen-year-old who owned an AR-15 that he wasn’t old enough to legally purchase, went to a protest where he goaded unarmed protesters to attack him, shot and killed two of them, wounded some others, and now is claiming he shot in self defense. Those unarmed protesters shoulda known better than to taunt him and make him afraid when he had his big gun in his hands.
I’ma thinkin’summat ain’t right.
It’s a tricky briar patch they want to throw me in. I live in Texas where you can now carry around a loaded gun concealed on your rabbit fur without having to get any kind of permit first. I may have to think twice about walking into anyplace named the OK Corral.
I am not the sort to solve my problems with a gun. If I am ever in a confrontation where someone has to be shot, it will most likely be me. I would sooner die than kill somebody.
But the world in general does not think like I do.
So, I am thinkin’ all tricksey about makin’ that old FOX throw me inta my laughin’ place. Somehow I gotta convince that old boy that I don’t wanna be there. Cuz them ol’ FOXes is cruel like that.
I will recover from my booster shot I will feel better in a day or two. The FOXes will probably look at this post and call me a racist, because of what I am actually saying. That’s how racists justify being racists. But the only race I really belong to is the ordinary rabbit-people race, also known as the human race. But rabbits come in many different colors, and lots of them are spotted. So what? What ya gonna make out o’ dat?
You don’t solve problems of violence with more violence. So, we gotta try something else. Any ideas?
“Mickey, why can’t you be more serious the way smart people are?”
“Well, now, my dear, I think I take humor very seriously.”
“How can you say that? You never seem to be serious for more than a few seconds in a row.”
“I can say it in a high, squeaky, falsetto voice so I sound like Mickey Mouse.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“I can also burp it… well, maybe not so much since I was in junior high.”
“I distinctly remember getting in trouble in Mrs. Mennenga’s third grade class in school for pantomiming pulling my beating heart out of my chest and accidentally dropping it on the floor. She lectured me about being more studious. But I made Alicia sitting in the row beside me laugh. It was all worth it. And the teacher was right. I don’t remember anything from the lesson on adding fractions we were supposed to be doing. But I remember that laugh. It is one precious piece of the golden treasure I put in the treasure chest of memories I keep stored in my heart.”
“I always listened to the words Groucho Marx was saying, even though he said them awfully fast and sneaky-like. I listened to the words. Other characters didn’t seem to listen to him. He didn’t seem to listen to them. Yet, how could he respond like he did if he really wasn’t listening? In his answers were always golden bits of wisdom. Other people laughed at his jokes when the laugh track told them to. I laughed when I understood the wisdom.”
“Laughing is a way of showing understanding. Laughing is a way of making yourself feel good. Laughing is good for your brain and your heart and your soul. So, I want to laugh more. I need to laugh more. I love to laugh.”
I have known nudists for a long time, since the 1980’s in fact. I have recently dabbled my toes in the cold waters of being a nudist myself. I did work on pool cracks this past summer while naked. I made one visit to a nudist park and actually got naked in front of strangers who were also naked. It is a certain kind of crazy connection to nature, my self, and the bare selves of others to be a nudist, even if it is for only a few hours. I used to think nudists were crazy people. But I have begun to understand in ways that are hard to understand. And being a novelist, that was bound to creep into the piles of supposedly wise understanding that goes into the creation of novels. I say “supposedly wise” because wisdom is simply the lipstick on the pig of ridiculous human experiences.
The Cobble family appeared first in my novel, Superchicken. It is a semi-autobiographical novel that uses some of my real life experiences and the real life experiences of boys I either grew up with or taught, mixed in with bizarre fantasy adventures that came from my perceptions of life as an adult. So the Cobble family really represent my encounters with nudism and the semi-sane people known as nudists. Particularly important to the story are the Cobble Sisters, twins Sherry and Shelly, who fully embrace the idea of being nudists and try to get other characters to not only approve of the behavior, but share in it. Sherry is the more forward of the two, more willing to be seen naked by the boys in her school and in her little Iowa farm town. Shelly is the quieter of the two, a bit more shy and a lot more focused on the love of one particular boy.
In fact, the Cobble Sisters are based on real life twin blond girls from my recollections of the past. The Cobble farm is out along the Iowa River and just north of Highway Three in Iowa. It is a real place where real twin girls lived when I was a boy. They were blond and pretty and outgoing. But they were not actually nudists. There was another pair of twin blond girls from my first two years of teaching who actually provided the somewhat aggressively sensual personalities of the Cobble Sisters. The real nudists I knew were mostly in Texas.
The sisters appear in more than one of the novels I have written or am in the process of writing. They appear for the second time in the novel Recipes for Gingerbread Children which I finished writing in 2016. They are also a part of the novel I am working on now, The Baby Werewolf. That last is probably the main reason they are on my mind this morning. Writing a humorous horror story about werewolves, nudists, pornographers, and real wolves is a lot more complex and difficult than it sounds. But it is hopefully doable. And my nudist characters are all basically representative of the idea that all honest and straight-forward people are metaphorically naked all the time. That’s the thing about those nudist twins. They don’t hide anything. Not their most private bits, and certainly not what they are thinking at any given time.
So as I continue to struggle with revealing myself as a writer… and possibly as a nudist as well, I will count on the Cobble Sisters to make certain important points about life and love and laughter… and how you can have all three while walking around naked.
Both novels discussed in this old post are now available from Amazon in self-published, finished form.
Catch a Falling Star 
Strawberry Fields
This foolish essay about berries that mean love to me is only partly inspired by the Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That’s because, of course, their song was only about meditating. In the lyrics they take you to the “Strawberry Fields where nothing is real… but it’s nothing to get hung up about…” They are talking about a blissful place of no worries where we all need to go. And then staying there forever.
This, of course, I could never do. Worrying about the future is tattooed on my behavioral imperatives in the dark part of my stupid old brain. And while I often found that place of no worries, and lingered there for a bit, I found you could never really get anything done if you stayed in that state of strawberry fields forever.
But don’t get me wrong, strawberries are a critical part of every healthy mental diet.
You see, my meditations on strawberries when I was a child of eight, nine, and ten centered on the strawberry patch at Great Grandma Hinckley’s place.
She was, as I incorrectly recall, slightly older than Jesus when I was that age. By that I mean, though she seemed museum-quality ancient to me, I had derived wisdom about life, love, and laughter from her before Sunday School taught me any of those things said in Jesus’s words.
And I was given the task of mowing her lawn in the little plot of land surrounding her little, tiny house in the Northern part of Rowan where I also lived and grew and celebrated Christmas and Halloween and Easter and the 4th of July. And though I was doing it because she was so old, I never even once thought she was too old and frail to do it herself. Grandma Hinckley’s willpower was a force of nature that could even quell tornados… well, I thought so anyway when I was eight. And she gave me a dollar every time I did the lawnmowing.
But there were other things she wanted done, and other things she wanted to teach me. There was the garden out back with the strawberry patch next to it. She wanted me to help with keeping the weeds and the saw grass and the creeping Charlie from overrunning the strawberries and choking them to death. (Creeping Charlie wasn’t an evil neighbor, by the way. He was a little round-leafed weed that grew so profusely that it prevented other plants from getting any sunlight on their own leaves, causing a withering, yellowing death by sunlight deprivation. I took my trowel to them and treated them like murderers. I showed them no mercy.)
And Grandma always reminded me not to be selfish and eat the very berries I was tending in the garden. She taught me that eating green strawberries (which are actually more yellow than green, but you know what I mean) was bad because they could give you a belly ache, a fact that that I proved to myself more than once (because eight-year-olds are stupid and learn slowly.) She also taught me that it is better to wait until you have enough strawberries to make a pie, or better yet, strawberry shortcake with whipped cream. She taught me that delayed gratification was more rewarding in the long run than being greedy in the short run and spoiling everything for everybody.
She always gave me a few of the ripe strawberries every time I helped her with them, even if I had eaten a few in the garden without permission. Strawberries were the fruit of true love. I know this because it says so in the strawberry picture. Even though I probably never figured out what true love really means.
My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was the foundation stone that my mother’s side of the family was built on. She was the rock that held us steadily in place during the thunderstorms, and the matriarch of the entire clan of Hinckleys and Aldriches and Beyers and other cousins by the dozens and grandchildren and great grandchildren and even great great grandchildren. I painted the picture of her in 1980 when she passed away. I gave it to my Grandma Aldrich, her second-eldest daughter. It spent three decades in Grandma’s upstairs closet because looking at it made Grandma too sad to be so long without her. The great grandchild in the picture with her is now a grandmother herself (though no one who has seen this picture knows who it is supposed to be because I painted her solely from memory and got it all wrong.) But Grandma Hinckley taught me what true love means. And true love has everything to do with how you go about taking care of the strawberry patch.
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