Anna Cripanuk   

ENGL 102

Blog Post #1

January 28, 2018

The Gift of Strawberries

    When I first began reading, “The Gift of Strawberries”, I felt that I could immediately relate to the young girl narrating the story. The main character explained an experience, “Behind our house were miles of old hay fields divided by stone walls, long abandonment from farming but not yet grown up to forrest”, (22). This quote brought back an abundance of childhood memories that I can vividly remember. When I used to live in Illinois, my family had a huge cornfield that stretched for miles on end, visible from our backyard. My parents would take my brother and I on walks through the field and we would fill plastic cups up a quarter way with pieces of dried corn. I can still feel the warm breeze from walking there so many times, and feel the corn in my hands. My dad would wrap a small amount of tinfoil around the dixie cup top and then wrap a rubber band around the top to keep it closed. My brother and I would shake those cups until we got bored. This was a fond childhood memory that was triggered when I read this story.

    Another memory from my childhood was thought of when reading the next few sentences of her story. On page 22 she says, “After the school bus chugged up our hill, I’d thrown down my red plaid bookbag, change my clothes before my mother could think of a chore, and jump across the crick to go wandering in the goldenrod,”. This is exactly what  my brother and I used to do whenever we would get home from school when we lived in North Carolina. If our mom witnessed us doing nothing, or going on electronics before dark, we would be assigned a chore, so we were never seen inside the house. My brother and I would walk around the pond and into the woods between the trail and the pond, and pick honeysuckle flowers. We would pick the pedals off and suck on the what we call, “honey stick”, and enjoy that time outside in nature. This not only bonded my brother and I, but also gave us a chance to really connect with nature, and enjoy our childhood outside exploring.