Of Strawberry Socials and Resilience Building

One of my recent conversations highlighted the seasonal round of local gatherings – strawberry teas, wild game dinners, and harvest suppers – gatherings that affirm a sense of place and time and community in their rhythm and repetition. This community is rich in such events. Every issue of The Equity, past and present, reports on the successes of a recent ‘happening’, or announces some up-coming occasion, from fishing derbies to theatre nights. What interests me particularly about these gatherings is their continuity over time, the way in which they serve to measure time and connect the past and the present. Not long after we came to Shawville I spent a wonderful day ‘putting up’ beet salad with two dear friends who had been making beet salad together on a similar early-September day for forty years. While we worked, they talked, and I listened. They laughed about their earliest beet-salad-making days, and about the years with various configurations of their children helping or getting underfoot. The inevitability of ripe beets in the fall became a back drop for changing circumstances and enduring friendship. It is the same relationship between place and time and community that is affirmed in the ritual of strawberry teas in early summer, or Grandma’s zucchini loaf at the cottage, or s’mores around the campfire… Please send me your stories about community and food and gatherings. I am interested in both the rituals you still repeat, and the ones that have been lost. There is a great deal of history, particularly local and community specific history hidden in what we eat, and how and where we eat it.