a celebration of strawberries
It's that time of year again: Strawberry season! We actually ate up our own meager crop a little while ago, but for the real players the harvest is coming in heavy now. And at the Congregational Church in town they know how to celebrate! The boys have been excited for the annual Strawberry Festival for over a week (we had some idea it might be last Thursday, so we were thinking about it early) and this evening we finally got to experience all the anticipated thrills. Well actually, in some cases the thrills didn't live up to the anticipation: the strawberry shortcake was great, but Elijah wished he could have more chocolate.
See, the way it works is that the offerings include mashed strawberries (with sugar or without), biscuit, whipped cream, ice cream (vanilla only) and hot fudge sauce. Any three is five dollars, more than three is seven. The past two or three festivals Lijah has chosen to have ONLY the hot fudge, and last year he made out like a bandit when they gave him a nearly full bowl and then didn't even charge us for it! This year, as befits a growing-up boy, he thought he'd try strawberries and whipped cream with his chocolate; and it was fine but he wanted more chocolate. So with his own money—naturally I paid for the first round—he went and stood in line again and ordered just hot fudge sauce. They charged him the $5 and gave him a meager spoonful that would have been disappointing on top of ice cream, so it was hard for him to recover the rest of the evening.
Still, there we were among the happy crowd on a beautiful midsummer evening, listening to a very talented young person sing and play acoustic guitar... so it was hard to be too upset. And now we're ready to start anticipating for next year.