Member-only story
Heart to Heart
The peak of Strawberry Season in Pennsylvania is in early June, right around the time that schools let out for summer. My best friend grew up on her family’s farmland 2 miles down the road from my house, during the summer months the orchard became our 300 acre playground. Our first days of freedom were marked by sneaking out to the rows and rows of fruit, laying in the dirt, picking the juiciest strawberries we could find. The sweetness was certainly rewarding, but there was another element of these adventures that remains with me: privacy.
Being out in that big empty field with just Lydia, Lauren, and Sarah allowed a space where no classmates could overhear our conversations and no little brothers could listen through the walls.
We were able to remove our carefully curated masks and be authentic with each other. We talked about the burden of being a sister and a daughter, how families can appear amazing from the outside but be riddled with distrust or avoidance on the inside. We could talk about the possibility of being too dumb, or being too smart. We could ponder why the 4 of us were better than everyone we knew, and we didn’t have to hide our pride, since we were the whole audience. We spoke of the chronically achy feeling of not fitting in at school. This type of vulnerable communication felt different to me but I couldn’t place why. The conversations felt confined to a space and time…
