“Heart berries,” the Anishinabe (= “Ojibwe”) call them.

Don't get me wrong, now: I like commercial strawberries just fine, while acknowledging that, eating them, we're essentially eating petroleum. In fact, I'm grateful for them and—the day is coming, let us admit it—when they're gone for good, I will truly, truly miss them.

But make no mistake: they're ciphers, no more, standing in for the real thing.

Until a friend recently gifted me with a bag of local strawberries, I'd forgotten just how very good they really are.

They're tiny, real strawberries, especially compared to those styrofoam monsters from the supermarket that you could carve a jack o' lantern from, that seem to get bigger and more flavorless every year. Our local berries, by contrast, are small: the very largest, maybe the size of your thumbnail.

Oh, but all that flavor packed into just one.

It doesn't get much more sensual than real strawberries. These, after all, are strawberries that you have to suck.

How to Eat a Real Strawberry

Hold strawberry by stem.

Suck strawberry off of stem.

Relish.

If necessary, lick juice off of chin.

Repeat.

Real strawberries are a personal experience. Individually is the only way to eat them. Each berry has a full flavor profile of its own, to be savored on its own recognizance.

If ever you wondered why the ancestors deemed one moon of the year worthy of naming for this Oh-so-intense-but-Oh-so-fleeting pleasure, be reminded.

The Strawberry Moon shines only once a year.

My friends, while we may, let us haste to partake.