The Weight of the Harvest

The kitchen table in my grandmother’s house always held a bowl of fruit, but it is the specific absence of the summer of 1994 that haunts me now. That was the year the garden failed, the year the vines withered before the berries could ripen, leaving behind only the dry, skeletal stems. We spent that July staring at empty patches of soil, waiting for a sweetness that never arrived. We learn early that life is defined by the cycles we expect to repeat, and when they don’t, we are left with a hollow space where the harvest should have been. We think we are mourning the fruit, but we are actually mourning the rhythm of the world—the promise that if you tend to something long enough, it will eventually offer itself to you. What happens to the hunger when the object of it vanishes? Is the desire itself enough to sustain us, or are we merely ghosts haunting the places where we once expected to be fed?

Catherine Ferraz has captured this fleeting, heavy sweetness in her image titled Strawberry Season. She reminds us that even when the season passes, the memory of the harvest remains etched in the quiet spaces of our lives. Does this image taste like the summer you are currently losing?