The mock strawberries are in bloom. And every yard I pass dotted with the tiny red fruit takes me back to my childhood summers.
Back then our backyard sprouted them, too. My sister and I knew better than to eat the wild berries — raw, anyway. But, we remembered once learning (after bingeing on raw cookie dough) that food was safe if only you cooked it … right?
More than once, on sweltering afternoons, we borrowed bowls from the kitchen and snuck into the shrubs that edged our chain-link fence. There, we made wild soup.
The recipe was simple: In a bowl, we combined a couple of handfuls of mock strawberries, a fistful of honeysuckle flowers, however many wild onions we could unearth, and water from the garden hose. We then mixed it with a twig before letting it bake in the sun for a few hours.
Inevitably, when we returned to our concoction, we would find it floating with half-dead insects.
But it was for the best. Next to soup-making, our second favorite pastime on hot summer days was playing “save the spider.” The soup became a treacherous swamp — and the mock strawberries, flotation devices.