Can You Celebrate the 4th Without Going to the Lake?

It was the 4th of July and all our relatives had gone to the lake. All except us. Dad was a small potato farmer and the plants were growing so fast that he could hardly keep up with the hoeing. He was out in the field on the John Deere tractor all day, going as fast as he could. He promised that if he got done soon enough, we’d still head for the cookout.

Meanwhile, Mom had other ideas. The morning was cool, and I followed her to the old pasture that was spread out on a steep hill.

The pasture had been part of a larger lot originally, deeded by the state to William Knight in the 1860s. A shoemaker from Hollis, with a wife and kids, Knight saw the chance for a better life by heading to the virgin land of northern Maine where he wasn’t beholdin' to anyone.

It's a mystery whether Knight, a Civil War vet, had anything to do with a story passed down about worn-out Civil War horses marched up to that very field to a long, deep hole. They were shot and pushed into that hole and buried. But with no markers or written history of the event, all I knew for sure was the sound of the wind whispering through the lone 100-year-old spruce that marked the border between us and our neighbor's field of grain.

In the early days of farming, crops were planted on this land: potatoes, red clover, oats. But when tractors increased in size, it was harder to harvest crops on such a hill. So the land was converted into pasture until the cattle were sold and the hill became a wild meadow where bears played and moose treaded in the brook below.

Mom led the way through the tall grass beside the road shoulder, down a small gully, and up onto the hill where a grove of paper birches greeted us. Beyond the trees was the old pasture.

“You spread the grass like so with your foot or hand,” Mom instructed, “and look near the ground. If you see red, it’s either ripe berries or those red-leaves that fool you. Now go away from here. I’ve got a good patch and you have to find your own.”

After spreading the grass with my feet and wandering around, listening to birds singing in the nearby woods, and watching white clouds sail by, I found my own patch. I could smell the sweetness of the berries before I saw them. They were so ripe that they almost fell into my hands as I placed them into the bowl Mom had given me. I ate a few and stepped on more and spilled some that the ants went after.

I was alone, it seemed, working for my own food, working whereever I wanted. I felt like the Knights might have felt when they found a good patch of strawberries.

When the sun was high and hot and we had enough berries, we hulled them at the house. Mom made a big pan of baking powder biscuits, mixed the berries with sugar, and whipped some cream. That night we had wild strawberry shortcake for dessert.

By then, I had forgotten about the lake. The cousins no doubt had bought their cultivated berries at a store or a road stand. But these wild berries were free and sweeter. And we were free to pick them again, someday, if we wanted to—a freedom on the land that I was learning to cherish.