Original strawberries consumed without aid of camera, above is a reasonable approximation

“Omon is not a particularly common name, and perhaps not the best there is. It was my father’s idea. He worked in the police all his life and wanted me to be a policeman too.

“Listen to me, Ommy, ” he used to say when he’d been drinking. “If you join the police with a name like that… then if you join the Party…”

Although my father had occasionally shot at people, he wasn’t really vicious by nature;in his heart he was a cheerful and sympathetic man. He loved me a lot, and hoped that life would at least grant me the achievements it had denied him. What he really wanted was to get hold of a plot of land somewhere near Moscow and start growing beetroot and cucumbers on it, not so that he could sell them at the market or eat them (though that too), but so that he could strip to the waist, slice into the earth with his spade, and watch the red worms and the other underground life wriggling about, so that he could cart barrowloads of dung from one end of the holiday village to the other, stopping at other peoples gates to swap a few jokes. When he realized he would never get any of this, he began to hope that at least one of the Krivomazov brothers would lead a long and happy life…” – Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin

A couple of days ago I spent the night in Jonava, Lithuania,
in the apartment of a Artillerist who is seeing a cousin of mine. It was simple, clean, and with the windows opened or closed had a fresh, sort of dewy air that made sleep there seem almost holistic. In the morning, over an early breakfast, I had an offer that made my polite,  ritualized refusals appear at their most half hearted. My friend the corporal offered me a large plastic bag of fresh strawberries, grown on a little family plot 8 kilometers outside of town.

Those of you who have never experienced such a thing as fresh strawberries, picked and placed before you hours before,  that have had to make do with those odd, fibrous, bloated, cucumberous paleness that must be basted in sugar and then dipped in to whipped cream and fired into a pastry to extract even a modicum of taste are truly to be pitied. These strawberries, most no bigger then a large marble and the largest a little smaller then a golf ball, are deep red like rubies and taste like sunsets. Of course they do not last, already a few of them are beginning to mush. I will endeavor to eat these anyway however, it would almost be criminal to sacrifice the little fellows.

Lithuania  was the last country in Europe to convert to Christianity. Before that they worshipped gods of water and earth; lightning and fire. And the Summer equinox festivals here, adopted by Christians as st. John’s day,  sacrifices are made to Žemyna, god of the harvest,  whose common prayer is: ”the Earth, my mother, you have given me life, you feed me, you carry me and after death I will rest in you.”. Drive along the road, near any house there is a small vegetable garden. Where there are no houses you may find little patchworks of turned over earth. These are by in large apartment dwellers who keep these places to supplement their meals, but also I suspect for the satisfaction of churning earth and watching things rise up out of it.  Perhaps this respect for earth’s bounty, combined with a more recent memory of shortages under communism, bring these people the miles it takes to get out to their small holdings. I must say there is something about that dedication that makes the gift all the more satisfying.