When I was a little girl, strawberry picking was one of my favorite activities. I loved the taste of those ruby bursts of sweetness, sure—but I also loved that the rectangular baskets with their sturdy wooden handles doubled as carriers for my baby dolls. I would wrap my dolls in blankets and nestle them inside, each taking on the scent of my favorite fruit.
So maybe it makes sense that when I was pregnant with my first child—and struck with terrible morning sickness that would have been better described as all-day sickness—the only thing that tasted good to me was freshly picked strawberries from my local farmers’ market in Kinston, North Carolina. That’s where I met Mr. Putnam, a kindhearted farmer I visited every chance I got to buy the fruits of his labor by the bucketful. Day after day, as my belly grew, we got to know each other under the shade of the dark green awning over the market’s cool concrete floor, and he would say, “That baby is going to be born with a strawberry.” I’d never heard that term for a little red birthmark, but I found the idea endearing, albeit unlikely. No one in my family had ever had such a thing.
Strawberry season turned to blueberry season and then cantaloupe season. My nausea faded, and Mr. Putnam recommended new treats for me—namely melon, cut in half and filled with ice cream. I’d never cared for the coral-fleshed fruit, but as I was eight months pregnant in a sweltering August, it tasted like mercy. I was writing my first novel then—a story shaped by the rhythms of growing seasons, about which I knew next to nothing. But Mr. Putnam knew about them. So as I filled my basket with vegetables I’d never before tasted—kohlrabi, pattypan squash—he told me about how he coaxed them from the soil and, perhaps more importantly, how to cook them once they reached my kitchen.
But then, when September arrived, this stranger who had become my friend passed away suddenly. Swamped with sadness, only days before my due date, I attended his funeral. There, in the huge Baptist church with high vaulted ceilings crowded with those who loved him, a fellow mourner took pity on me and offered me his seat. Instead of making me wait in the endless receiving line, the family pulled me up front for hugs. They had heard about my insatiable appetite for their wares and recounted Mr. Putnam’s proclamation: That baby is going to be born with a strawberry.
Our son, Will, arrived just a few days later. He was a beautiful, strong boy with big blue eyes—and, incredibly, a strawberry birthmark at the base of his hairline (a nod, no doubt, to the man who, like so many farmers, had fed us well). Unsurprisingly, Will became obsessed with strawberries, and he was often scented with them like those baby dolls I’d once doted on. We ate them in abundance, still from the Putnam family farm—so many, in fact, that my mother-in-law worried that Will would develop an allergy.
Fourteen years later, my son’s birthmark has faded almost completely. But if I lift his hair in just the right light, I am reminded of that long, hot summer when I was creating my most precious gift—and when I learned that just a couple of miles from my own home there was a farmer growing love. And strawberries. Which, if you ask me, are pretty much the same thing.
—New York Times best-selling author Kristy Woodson Harvey is the author of the recently released Summer State of Mind, Under the Southern Sky, and the Peachtree Bluff series.
