Nuts and Berries

There is a Strawberry Festival going on in downtown Durham and at the Raleigh Farmer's Market tomorrow.

Reminds me of the stuff my brother and I did when we were little.

I read a lot of books so I had a wild imagination and always wanted to try to figure things out and build something. I got very into Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain, & the Laura Ingles Wilder books.
I also had read all the Nancy Drew books by the 5th grade so I was into subterfuge and intrigue wherever it could be found. This often ended up in me getting us in a lot of trouble.

After reading Cherry Ames School Nurse (where they made perfume from an old forgotten recipe) I decided the neighborhood kids and I could do the same with a trashcan full of water, acorns, moss, rotting trees, leaves, pine cones, grass, pollen, & wild flowers. (Wildflowers because the flowers in my mother's garden had already been made off-limits to me during my hunting and gathering phase when I was preparing for The Long Winter. She also hated it when she caught me peeling bark off the pine trees. Mom just didn't get what life on the frontier could really be like.) I had the kids all running around for days gathering up everything we could find (a few of mom's flowers could have made it in there). I was sure after a week of fermenting, a beautiful scent would be emitted and we could sell it.

After a few days, Mom caught me dumping her perfume in there to hurry along the process. (The neighbors needed to see results.) That went over badly. Two weeks later, John and I decided there was no hope and that we just HAD to have the perfume. Our reasoning was that it stunk to high heaven. My poor mother. Looking back I would have been less than thrilled if someone was pouring my Versace into a woodland bog. Kids just have no concept. After a month of it sitting out there and all that work, we threw it on the neighbor's basset hound and he howled and rolled around in the grass for a while trying to get the stench off.

One year, when the first crop of strawberries came in I was convinced we could sabatoge them by cutting off the tops, hollowing out the middle, filling them with lemon juice, and then putting the tops back on. The idea was that the adults would bite into an explosion of lemon juice. I decided that we needed to make sure the plan was fool proof and convinced John to test one. We were busted by the time his screaming subsided.