The first strawberries!

At the Borough Hall Farmers Market this afternoon, sold by Kernan Farms, from New Jersey. The first one I tasted five minutes ago swept me right back to the stretch of road in the forest between Knysna and Plettenberg Bay, where a man with a beard once lived in a real old wooden gypsy caravan and sold the strawberries he grew in a cleared field, flanked by walls of old trees. For years after he disappeared we would still stop and hunt the rapidly rising new growth to discover the sweet red berries. I collected them once in a tiny pillow slip that my mother had sewn for one of my bears, who always traveled with me. A red juice stain crept through the soft cream fabric.

These are real, perfumed strawberries, worth the long, long wait. Our evening roof drink will be strawberries,  red wine and ice, somehow. A delicate, buttery pastry is about to be made. Something simple, with heaps of the fruit in the middle, on a soft pile of sour cream laced with sugar.

It's May.