Mid-June, and it should be wild strawberry season.
It’s not, of course; our wild strawberry plants all burned up in the drought two summers ago. Oddly, the wild raspberries survived; perhaps their spines function like those of the prickly pear, inhibiting water loss. Or maybe they’re just more stubborn than the fruit my own people call heart berries.
The reason should be obvious. Have you ever really looked at a strawberry? Wide, flared, rounded top tapering to a point, usually a cleft somewhere down the middle, looking for all the world at once like the chambers of a beating heart and the more symmetrical form of its stylized symbology. That’s all the more true of wild strawberries, usually smaller, more rounded and compact . . . and also sweeter, with a far more intense flavor than their commercially grown counterparts.
But there’s another reason, too, less a separate factor than a supplemental one. In our way, at this season, we are entering the heart of a sweet red summer moon.
The colonial world makes much of so-called “Native American” names for the moons of the year. Mostly, they’re entirely wrong, which is to say, they try to universalize what may in fact be one people’s name for a particular moon (or may in fact never have been anyone’s at all, but a stereotyped and stereotyping fiction created sprung wholly from the imaginations of colonial populations). But there is one that bears some resemblance to truth: the early moons of summer, as named by my own ancestors.
But even that varies by geography. Our ancestors understood their world, and so named it, by its actions, not by fungible, shifting and easily shifted labels. And so a moon that in the warmer western regions of our ancestral lands would shine upon newly fruited berries would become the Berry Moon. otherwise known as June. In the eastern regions of my own homelands, colder and wetter, this time would still be the Flowering Moon, as the petals began to come into their own; it would be another month before warmth of July’s Berry Moon could call the fruit to harvest.
The Indigenous people of this land understand and acknowledge the moon differently. It’s a language that remains unwritten, because our peoples have always known that words hold power, and here, the words are not to be exposed to the dangers of a colonial world.
But however we understand our cosmos and cosmologies, we hold its existence in common, and some things remain constant. What the outside world called this month’s “pink moon” was in fact, when low in the sky, more amber than rose; more silver than strawberry when floating high above the land. But eve now, on the wane, it still presides over the earth’s fruiting and flowering, and while we have no wild strawberries this year, the wild raspberry patch is in full abundant leaf already. Its berries, too, will resemble small hearts.
For now, it doesn’t feel much like summer at all. Too cold, too dry: not enough warmth in the days’ highs, while overnight lows have plunged below the freezing mark; in what should already be the monsoon season, precious little rain for an earth as dry as ash and bone. We have already been deprived of one of summer’s sweetest gifts here, the small crimson heart berries. But we can still hope for the survival of their tart and prickly cousins, more fruit from the heart of a sweet red summer moon.
In days as dark and deadly as these, bright flowers and tangy sweet berries and the moons that rise protectively over them are all special gifts now — gifts from the heart of earth and sky, of the cosmos and the spirits themselves. We need to remember, to notice, to acknowledge and appreciate, to honor and be thankful for them all.
~ Aji
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