It’s finally strawberry season in Minnesota. It’s so late that I almost thought we wouldn’t have one. My berry plants certainly didn’t seem to be setting much fruit, when I glanced at them. They produced very little last year, too, so I didn’t have high hopes this year, what with the cool, gray, wet weather we’ve been having.

Peter’s Pumpkins & Carmen’s Corn (a local farm that grows wonderful organic produce) posted on Facebook that they have strawberries available. I decided to call and get some today. (If you live in Shakopee and don’t know about Peter’s Pumpkins & Carmen’s Corn, you should. Their sweet corn is the best around, and their other produce is wonderful, too.) The strawberries are pricey at $6 a quart, but these are real strawberries, not the chewy, woody, almost tasteless red fruit that is available at the grocery stores. They are small, fragrant, fragile and delicious. I only bought a quart today, thinking I didn’t have time to process more.

When we came home, my daughter sampled a few and said, “I think I’ll check on our strawberries.” I gave her a plastic bowl and sent her out to the garden while I started washing and hulling.

She came back five minutes later with six strawberries in the bowl. “I cut my ankle,” she said, “and when I noticed it was bleeding, I came in.” (She is fine. It was more of a scratch than a cut.)

“Are there many berries out there?” I asked.

“A few,” she said and disappeared into her room.

After supper, my husband walked the dog, and when he returned he said, “Boy, you can really smell those strawberries out there. Are you sure we don’t have very many?”

I told him about Natalie and the six strawberries, but I promised to look after I finished a few other chores.

I should have looked sooner. I should have taken a better look yesterday, or even Saturday. There are strawberries galore. Some of them were already over ripe, and some had been sampled by our wildlife. I picked two quarts, and I probably only checked half the bed. The mosquitoes were becoming too annoying for me to continue.

These are the glistening, ephemeral jewels of summer, the juicy, ruby-colored food of the gods. I can’t remember what variety I planted five years ago, but they are good. They are even more fragile than the ones I purchased from Carmen. They will not keep once picked. They must be washed and consumed quickly. I’m doing my part.

I’ve always loved strawberries. When I was still living with my parents and my mother would hull strawberries, she would retell the story of me as a toddler shadowing her while she cleaned and hulled strawberries. “You’d say ‘I yike sawberries’ over and over until I gave you some,” Mom would say. I don’t remember that, but I do remember shadowing her while she did it as I grew older. If she had only bought a pint or a quart, she might only let me have one while saving the rest for dessert. When we had more, she would let me have a bowl of them and tell me not to spoil my dinner. I would say that I could never have too many strawberries.

That turned out not to be true. Although my dad planted a vegetable garden for years, he didn’t plant strawberries until I was in middle school. I think this may have had something to do with me teasing him and promising to take care of the strawberry bed. So he planted a large bed, probably 10 x 20 feet. He tried a new, Minnesota-hardy ever-bearing variety. I don’t recall the name of it, but we talked about it a great deal as I helped him set the plants in. That was when I first learned about planting zones.

We didn’t get many strawberries the first year. I remember being crushingly disappointed, but Dad and Mom both told me they would probably do better the next year. They were right. I truly did get sick of strawberries that summer. I got even more sick of weeding the patch and picking the berries. I was supposed to go out every day and weed and pick—200 square feet of strawberry bed is a lot to crawl through. I didn’t like the bugs that were out there, or the occasional toad, and I remember being grateful when it rained. My brother was no help. He didn’t like strawberries, so he refused to pull weeds in that part of the garden. (I tried that logic with the peas, but no one accepted that.) When I whined to my dad, he would just say that I had promised to help take care of them. I think even Mom grew tired of cleaning, hulling and freezing them.

The next year, I was ready for strawberries again, though, and I went out eagerly at first to look for them. They were few and far between. We only had a few berries that year, and for most years thereafter. I think Dad tried tilling them up and even replanting them, but they never equaled that second season. Fortunately, our neighbors had better luck with their June-bearing varieties and they would often share.

Strawberry season at our house meant three things: strawberry shortcake, angel food cake with strawberries, or frozen strawberry dessert. My favorite was the frozen dessert, but Mom would only make that for company. Angel food cake with strawberries was also more of a special-occasion dessert. For the family, during strawberry season, she’d make shortcake, and that is my favorite to this day. Mom made simple, sweet biscuits from her Betty Crocker cookbook. She would mix up the dough, roll it out, cut out circles, and bake. They would be cooling while we ate supper, and then afterward, she’d bring them over to the table. She’d slice them and drizzle macerated strawberries and juice over them and then pour cream over the top: not whipped cream, just straight cream or half-and-half. Sometimes she’d have Cool Whip to serve with them, but I would always pass on that. (My mother-in-law makes them much the same way, and she always has whipped cream to go with them. When I first served strawberry shortcake swimming in cream to my husband, he was revolted. I have to have Cool Whip or whipped cream for him.) The smell of shortcake always takes me back to that small kitchen, waiting through supper for the delicious shortcake, berries, and cream. It’s an easy form of time travel, and I hope that I am creating some memories for my family. I hope strawberry season will be special for them, too.

I’ve written about my perspective of my son going away to camp. I thought I ought to share some his perspective. He is tired of me asking about it now, but these are some of the comments he has made over the past few days.

I asked about his cabin mates. He said they were ok but “two of the boys had anger issues. If they got mad, they would just erupt.” Also, “They didn’t like to sleep. They kept turning on their flashlights and shining them around in people’s faces, and one boy kept climbing up into my bunk.” I wonder what the other boys are saying about him? And where did he learn about “anger issues?”

About the food: “It was great. We had orange chicken for supper, and it was pretty good. For breakfast we had omelets and cereal. The cereal was great. It was called Captain Crunch.” (Yes, it’s true, I’ve never let my kids eat Captain Crunch, which I suppose is an important part of growing up in America.) He didn’t have much to say about lunch either day. He said that they had orange chicken for supper again the second night, “and then I had cereal again for breakfast today [on Friday]. You really should get some of that.”

On the games they played: “They were awesome. We started out playing ‘drip-drip-drop,’ which is like duck-duck-goose only you use water. But then they just started dumping buckets of water on people and it turned into a giant water fight. It was great. On the second day, we did it again, but we had squirt guns and water balloons, too. It was awesome!” I don’t know how the girls felt about that, but I’m sure this was a hit with the boys. It may explain some of the wet clothes in the suitcase.

On canoeing: “Yeah, it was ok. We didn’t go out very far into the lake.” Not much else to say.

On fishing and girls: “I didn’t catch anything, but one boy caught a snapping turtle. And one of the girls wouldn’t believe it was a snapping turtle. She said there aren’t any in Minnesota, but I told her about the one at Maddie’s house and the ones at the cabin. She wouldn’t believe me.”

“Did you do much with the girls?” Shrug. “Not really.” Especially after they don’t know about snapping turtles, I guess.

On wildlife: “I saw a gardener snake.”

“Really? Let’s look it up in your reptiles and amphibians book.”

He paged through the book until he found a garter snake. “Yeah, this one. Hmm. It’s called a garter snake. I was looking for frogs and I heard a rustle and I thought, ‘Could it be?’ But I saw it was a snake instead of a frog. It was still cool, but it wasn’t a frog.” He really loves frogs. I mentioned in Part I about how someone found a frog but let it go before he could see it. He was still disappointed about that, but he has gotten over it.

His camp experience has stirred up an interest in magic tricks. Part of the fun on Thursday was a visit by a magician. (If he could remember the name of the magician I would credit him.) Our son loves magic, and has always been interested in learning tricks. Now he is obsessed. He has been begging to watch Youtube videos about magic tricks and asking when we can go to a magic store so he can spend his allowance on supplies. It has replaced his obsession with Minecraft, which is not a bad thing.

“Anything else you want to tell us about camp?” I asked on Saturday.

“No, that’s pretty much it. It was fun. I can’t wait until next year.” Time to go on to something else-in this case, learning new magic tricks.

And the big question: “Did you miss us?” I asked this on the way to the car as we were leaving camp.

He cocked his head and considered the question. “I don’t think I really thought of you at all,” he replied.

This wasn’t the punch to the solar plexus that I thought it would be. I was relieved that he had such a good time and that he is growing up enough to find his own way in the world. I admit to a twinge of sadness, though, that he’s not my “little” boy any more.

It was a good experience for all of us. I am glad it’s over, though, and he’s .back home. He seems to have grown over the two days he was gone. I think he has realized that he doesn’t need me all of the time, and that’s a good lesson for a boy to learn. It’s a good one for me, too.

Anxiety accompanied me on the trip back from camp. Neither the counselor nor any of his bunkmates had been in the cabin when we had first arrived. I had visions of larger boys teasing and tormenting my son. I had visions of him pouting when he didn’t get to do what he wanted—and he is a champion pouter. I still had all the “what ifs” of drowning, getting bitten by something, falling out of the bunk bed, and more. I had to talk myself out of this, and I tried.

Back in town at last, I had to pick up our daughter from an activity and run an errand with her. She asked questions about the camp, since she had gone the two previous years. (Her 4-H camp this year was a youth leadership camp held the week before at the State Fairgrounds.) I could not answer her questions, since I had not seen the counselor or any of the other boys. She was upbeat and excited for her brother, and that helped me, too.

We all missed him. I caught our daughter going in to his bedroom and looking around, and she admitted that she missed him. It seemed strange on Thursday to have only one child with me as we ran errands. It seemed strange at the dinner table and doing dishes without him there. It seemed strange to put only one child to bed and not two. I missed him, and I worried about him.

The weather cooperated for Wednesday and Thursday. It was warmer than it has been for most of the spring, and the rain held off. (I hoped he was not too hot in the cabin.) I was glad of this for it seemed likely that he would be able to swim and canoe and fish, which were the things he most wanted to do, besides hunt for frogs.

The storm hit Friday morning. It was about 3:30 am when the weather radio sounded the alert for a severe storm. In the bleary darkness, I could do nothing for my son but pray that he was safe and the storm was not threatening camp. The radar showed that the trailing edge of the storm was going to hit camp after it had passed us, so that gave me plenty of time to lie in bed and worry.

The phone didn’t ring, aside from the severe storm alert call. No texts appeared on my cellphone. I received no emails. I had to believe that all was well. I had a great sympathy for my mother who allowed me to go to camp for a week my first time, although I was 11 not 9.

The campers were sitting on benches singing songs when I arrived. Other parents had arrived first—I was not the only anxious one. At last I saw him in the gaggle of kids in green shirts. He looked tired and unhappy (uh-oh) as I waved and smiled but aside from dirty knees, I could detect no immediate signs of neglect or injury. The counselors dismissed the kids to the lodge to pick up their things. The other kids came out; no sign of my son. After most of the kids had emerged, I went in to see what was holding him up.

He was still trying to pack things in his suitcase. Wet things.

“Where’s your Ziploc bag?” I asked.

“I didn’t have time when it came to pack up to put them in there,” he said.

I didn’t think it was worthwhile to point out that it would have taken very little time.

“Where’s the sack for your sleeping bag?”

“I couldn’t get it to fit, so it’s in the suitcase,” he replied.

At least his sleeping bag was rolled up. I had seen two kids carrying unrolled sleeping bags, which were dragging in the mud.

I helped him shove the last items in his suitcase and zip it closed. “Well, we can repack it when we get to the car,” I said, “so we can get the wet things out.”

“No, I just want to go home.”

“Didn’t you have a good time?”

“Oh, yeah, but I just want to go home.”

“What’s the matter?” By this time we were on the way to the car.

He mumbled something about somebody finding a frog that morning but not letting him see it, and someone else telling him that he didn’t have to see everything and wild animals should be left alone. There was a catch in his voice, and he seemed close to tears.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “Do you want a hug?”

He stood still while I hugged him but didn’t return it. I took note of the dark circles under his eyes.

“Well, how about we stop at Dairy Queen on the way home?”

“Yes, please.”

So we did. There were other families from camp already there, including two brothers who had been in his cabin. They invited us to sit with them while we ate our treats. I was glad to learn that they were about the same age as my son, and in fact, the boys told us that except for the counselor, they had all been between ages 9 and 11.

Son’s spirits perked up a bit while we ate our treats and he talked to his friends. They all like to play the Minecraft computer game, so they talked about that. I could tell that son was still very tired, though, perhaps more so than the other boys. I was glad when it was time to get back on the road, so I could have my son to myself again.

I wasn’t able to talk to him about camp any more, though. He fell asleep within moments. This was not the light head-bobs form of sleeping in the car. This was full-scale slumped-over-against-the-car-door-and-drooling sleep. It was a quiet drive home.

When we arrived, I thought that his nap would have refreshed him, but it only made him crabbier. He wanted to lie down on the couch and go back to sleep. I insisted that he come upstairs and get cleaned up before getting into his own bed. It was a battle. He wept and raged over a bath, unreasonable in his exhaustion. I prevailed, but I had to do most of the bathing. He stopped fighting, anyway, so I could see the bug bites and the sunburn, the dirt caked under his fingernails and on his knees. The water in the tub turned gray. He said he showered at camp, but I don’t think it was very effective. At least I didn’t find any ticks.

At last, I tucked him in to bed, and I think he fell asleep again before I closed the door. One of the few things he told me was that he didn’t get much sleep because the other boys kept waking up and turning on their flashlights and bothering him and the others. He said he had still been awake when the storm hit early in the morning, and that had kept him awake longer.

While he slept, I unpacked his suitcase. Everything was soaked. His ditty bag was at the top of his suitcase, empty. The Ziploc bag was at the bottom, empty. In between there were wet clothes, sand, and his toiletries, clearly tossed in without any thought other than getting packed in a hurry. The outside pocket of the suitcase held his wet beach shoes, an additional pair of wet sneakers, and the wet cinch sack for his sleeping bag. I’m not sure if everything was wet when he put it in there or if the beach shoes made everything wet. His suitcase also contained a shirt and a pair of shorts that do not belong to him. I could not find any names, but I’ll try to track down the owner through 4-H. His pillowcase held his pillow, additional toiletries, and a marshmallow shooter he had made. (It is one of his prize possessions now.)

I made him get up after 2 hours of sleep, to eat dinner. He revived a little over supper, and he and daughter shared stories about camp. He was still tired and cross, though. We all asked him, “Did you have a good time?” He always said yes, and he wants to go again. I think I’ll be more relaxed next year, but I’m planning some additional classes on packing his suitcase.

I sent my son to camp. He’s only 9 years old, and this is the first time he’s slept away from home without us. I was more worried than he was, of course. Mothers are like that, I think.

He wanted to go. He asked in March if he could go to an overnight camp, and I asked him what kind of camp he wanted. “One where I can swim and canoe and fish and look for frogs,” he said. “You can do that at the cabin,” I said. “Yeah, but by myself, not at the cabin,” he replied.

4-H Camp seemed like a good compromise. It’s only a little over an hour away. Our daughter has gone there for the past two years. It was her first overnight camp, too, her first chance to spend two nights away from home instead of just one at a friend’s sleepover. She didn’t want to go to camp until she had completed fifth grade, and she went with other girls she knew from 4-H. There are no boys of son’s age in our 4-H club, but kids don’t have to be members to go to the camp. So I advertised: I posted on my Facebook page, I sent emails to other parents, I asked parents when I saw them. None of his friends could go.

Son was all signed up, and I started to wonder: was I crazy to let my 9-year-old go to an overnight camp? Is he too young? He must be too young. What will he do if something happens? What if he gets sick? What if he gets homesick? What if there are severe storms? What if the older kids are mean? What if the counselors don’t pay attention? What if, what if, what if?

In the days leading up to camp, I tried to feel him out. “So, what do you think about camp?” I asked. “I can’t wait” or “It’s going to be great” were the usual answers. Only the day before did he express a slight concern about not knowing anyone. We found out later that night that there would be one boy he knew from our club, although the boy is a couple of years older. That made him more at ease, and he woke up confident and ready to go.

After breakfast, he went upstairs to pack. Within minutes, I heard him on the stairs with his suitcase. (It was so full that it’s a wonder he didn’t fall down the stairs with it.) After I finished my coffee, we carried it back upstairs so I could inspect it. Keep in mind that this was Wednesday morning. I was planning to drop him off at 1:00 pm that day and pick him up at 1:00 on Friday: 48 hours. His suitcase contained: 4 pairs of shorts, 2 t-shirts, 2 pairs of underwear, 2 pairs of socks, pajamas, ditty bag with toiletries, swimsuit, and a washcloth—wet. Most of the clothes near it were also wet by this time.

I tossed the wet clothes in the dryer and proceeded to repack. We added a couple of pairs of socks and underwear “just in case”, removed 2 pairs of shorts, added a jacket, beach shoes and a beach towel, and a 2-gallon resealable plastic bag. (Thank you, Ziploc.) I pointed out to him that on Friday morning when he repacked, he should place his wet items including beach shoes, beach towel, washcloth “and any other wet things” into the plastic bag. He watched and nodded. I may have mentioned this several times, because finally he said, with an eye roll, “I got it, Mom.”

Downstairs, we also added sunscreen, bug repellant, and a hat. He was confident that he was now ready to go and wanted to leave right away. I reminded him that we didn’t need to leave for a few hours yet and suggested he use the intervening time productively, e.g., cleaning his room, reading a book, or doing a page in his summer workbook. He did read for a little while, eventually.

Finally, we were on our way. I tried to keep his spirits up by talking about various things. He fell asleep for a little while, which is unusual. When he awoke, he was good humored and patient with me as I reminded him about listening to the counselors, sunscreen first and then bug spray, staying with the group, etc. I’m pretty sure that he did not listen to me-the voice of adults in the old Charlie Brown tv shows come to mind. His video game, by the way, was inadvertently left at the cabin on the last visit, so he was unable to pass the time that way. I hoped that might help him pay more attention to me, but I don’t think the toy’s absence made a difference.

We arrived at Camp Patterson at last. We had to wait in line to check in, and who should we find directly ahead of us but the familiar face of the other boy from our 4-H club. Familiar boy is older but friendly, and the two have played together before. I hoped that they might be in the same cabin. It was not to be. In too little time son was checked in, parent drop-off card was signed, and it was time to head to the cabin.

The cabins at Camp Patterson are not deluxe. They are simple cabins with 10 bunk beds, no bathrooms (toilet and shower facilities are in a shared building, twenty yards or so away), no air conditioning, a single lightbulb overhead. The camp was started in 1927, and although I think the cabins are more recent than that (1970s?), they are not fancy. In son’s eyes, they were perfect. He chose a bed, plunked his suitcase and bedroll down, and was ready to dash off. I reminded him to put on bug spray and asked for a hug. Fortunately, he complied.

He headed off to the playing fields, where most of the other kids were gathered for a game of kickball. I walked back to the main building, behind him but not following, on my way to the car. He turned around and ordered, “Mom, stop following me, just leave!” “I’m just going to the car,” I said, “I’m not following you. ‘Bye.” “’Bye,” he said and dashed off. I walked on to the car, my heart reeling as I remembered the little boy in the hospital, a few hours old, covered with tubes and monitors. This is what I wanted, I reminded myself, for him to grow up to be healthy and strong enough to live his own life.