I remembered the smell of smultron (wild strawberries) from my childhood -perhaps because the sun was shining? My best friend, Gittan, and I were out walking in Ugglarp. Why I don’t know. We did a lot of walking trying to stay out of the way of the adults, they always seemed to have chores for us.
We walked up a small road, really only a track which lead to the schoolmaster’s house on a small hill with a small forest behind it. The road was dirt and the middle had grass and low flowers in it, the sides had tall grass and lots of wildflower, and somewhere a ditch, there were fields on both sides.
We could hear the insects buzzing and saw a few butterflies, mostly Monarch but also some yellow ones. The flowers were abundant and their colors strong reds, purple, violet, pink, yellow, white, orange, a riot of colors really. In the middle were little yellow flowers un clusters called “hästhovar” or “Horses’ hoofs.” They looked like the hoofs of horses upside down.
It was a warm day with the sun high above us, a lazy day, and we dawdled talking, about lots of things and nothing. What we wanted to do when we were adults, wondering about Gittan’s older sister who was 17 and working in the store, and young men coming by making eyes at her. About the boys at the house her grandmother rented to vacationers, they were more our age and might be fun to play with.
And then we came to the spot that was the purpose of our walk – smultronen, the strawberries. We got long straws of grass and began threading the strawberries on them so we could carry them with us and eat them along the way. When we picked the strawberries they smelled so delicate and soooo sweet, and were all white and creamy inside and a deep rich red on the outside. They looked like red pearls on the grass straws. We picked the spot clean and then began the lazy walk back while eating each smultron and savoring each tiny bite of it. Utter contentment.
