bea's back, with berries

Bea, the horse-cum-sheep trailer, was in bad shape. The broken door was the final straw, and I dropped her off at the trailer hospital about two months ago.

In case you can't tell where she gets her name,

that is a little picture of a bee on the front of the trailer

A complete overhaul, a new door (let's not discuss the cost) and a bit of patchwork and she was ready to come home. I drove her back through a series of torrential rainstorms last week. Our barn looks complete with her parked in front; it was a bit bare without her. Funny how inanimate objects start to take up a definitive place in the scheme of things.

On the way down to pick her up, I caught sight of a roadside stand selling fresh-picked strawberries, and I practically made a U-turn in the middle of the road to get to it. I knew that I would not want to visit it once I had a trailer in tow!

The haul: two quarts of little perfect strawberries. I happened to have a cooler in the truck and I popped them right in.

What a difference from the store-bought berries I had purchased just the day before!

I can't fault the store-bought berries too much. To be fair, despite the most careful of treatment, the road-side berries were already bruised and starting to spoil by the time I got home... though the taste was without comparison.

Most of the berries went onto shortbread cookies for an after-school snack. The remainder were made into a berry sauce for pancakes the next morning. I'm glad I stopped to grab them, as the farms around here are almost done with their berry crop—in the beginning of June!—thanks to the recent heat wave.

If there's one thing I've learned by focusing on a local diet, it's that you have to grab these treats when you see them. You often don't get a second chance.