So I started buying quality boxed mixes, which tasted pretty good.

Then I discovered the world of pre-baked, high quality angelfood cakes available at reputable bakeries almost everywhere.

You almost make me want to attempt it from scratch again, but alas I have no berries.

P.P.S. My family used to have a strawberry patch that, because my mom couldn’t decide which of the zillion varieties of berries she wanted to try planting, she tried half of them, somehow turned into a roadside commercial enterprise at some point, and it yielded the best strawberries I have every eaten anywhere. By the truckload.

Seriously.

She sold like 150 pounds of berries one season to friends, and also to strangers that stopped by because they saw the sign in their yard.

Which, a few years ago, and as an extremely tangential story, also led to some crazy woman buying enough rhubarb from them to fill the back of a mid-sized truck. I shudder to think what one does with that much rhubarb.

Then a drought and some injudicious transplanting whittled it back down to a normal strawberry bed, which is a little too far away from where I live now to enjoy as anything more than a delightful memory.

I miss my mom’s strawberry-rhubarb pie, made with a pate sucre crust, and a lattice top.

At first I experienced a strange zing in my mouth from the sour cream not being whipped cream, and then I felt a pleasant zenlike happiness that radiated from my tastebuds outward through the rest of my body.

I must have eaten at least a pound of berries there, eschewing all other foods. And no one else was really eating them, so I didn’t feel too piggish.