Braiding Sweetgrass

In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them, not to exclude the maples, hemlocks, white pine, goldenrod, asters, violets, and mosses of upstate New York, but it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it. Behind our house were miles of old hay fields, divided by stone walls, long abandoned from farming but not yet grown up to forest. After the school bus chugged up our hill, I'd throw down my red-plaid book bag, change my clothes before my mother could think of a chore, and jump across the creek to go wandering in the goldenrod. Our mental maps had all the landmarks we kids needed, the fort under the sumacs, the rock pile, the river, the big pine with branches so evenly spaced you could climb to the top as if it were a ladder, and the strawberry patches. White petals with a yellow center, like a little wild rose, they dotted the acres of curl grass in May during the flower moon, Wabagiwanagizis. We kept good track of them, peeking under the trifoliate leaves to check their progress as we ran through on our way to catch frogs. After the flower finally dropped its petals, a tiny green nub appeared in its place, and as the days got longer and warmer, it swelled to a small white berry. These were sour, but we ate them anyway, impatient for the real thing. You could smell ripe strawberries before you saw them, the fragrance mingling with the smell of sun on damp ground. It was the smell of June, the last day of school when we were set free, and the strawberry moon, Odemanagizis. I'd lie on my stomach in my favorite patches, watching the berries grow sweeter and bigger under the leaves. Each tiny wild berry was scarcely bigger than a raindrop, dimpled with seeds under the cap of leaves. From that vantage point, I could pick only the reddest of the red, leaving the pink ones for tomorrow. Even now, after more than 50 strawberry moons, finding a patch of wild strawberries still touches me with a sensation of surprise, a feeling of unworthiness and gratitude for the generosity and kindness that comes with an unexpected gift, all wrapped in red and green. Really? For me? Oh, you shouldn't have. After 50 years, they still raise the question of how to respond to their generosity. Sometimes it feels like a silly question with a very simple answer, eat them. But I know that someone else has wondered these same things. In our creation stories, the origin of strawberries is important. Sky Woman's beautiful daughter, whom she carried in her womb from Sky World, grew on the good green earth, loving and loved by all the other beings. But tragedy befell her when she died giving birth to her twins, Flint and Sapling. Heartbroken, Sky Woman buried her beloved daughter in the earth. Her final gifts, our most revered plants, grew from her body. The strawberry arose from her heart. In Pottawatomie, the strawberries, Odeamin, the heart berry. We recognize them as the leader of the berries, the first to bear fruit. Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own. It's free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It's not a reward, you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery. As with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source. Those fields of my childhood showered us with strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, hickory nuts in the fall, bouquets of wildflowers brought to my mom, and family walks on Sunday afternoon. They were our playground, retreat, wildlife sanctuary, ecology classroom, and the place where we learned to shoot tin cans off the stone wall. All for free. Or so I thought. I experienced the world in that time as a gift economy.