Strawberry Wine

"The fields have grown over now
Years since they've seen a plow
There's nothing time hasn't touched
Is it really her or the loss of my innocence
I've been missing so much?
Yeah

Strawberry wine and seventeen
The hot July moon saw everything
My first taste of love, oh bittersweet
The green on the vine
Like strawberry wine"

Amazon music was playing that song while I studied.

I looked up, away from the adenosine and enzymes and all things forgotten years ago. Listened to the minor notes of the break. Of the fields grown over. Of nothing that time hadn't touched.

Our study was about an enzyme blocker; a new drug that would support one of the most expensive and curative cancer treatments ever designed. A tiny molecule. A co-drug that would protect a patient's body from it's own version of biochemical suicide - while the other drug worked its magic.

It made me think of my sister, wondering if this would have saved her, six short years ago. I thought of her in hospice; hopeless. It helped me remember that this wasn't about a twisted, helical puzzle of molecules and pathways and cell biochemistry. It was about life.

Like the special one that we lost.

Life, a collection of untold moments of fullness.

Like that July moon in 1976. The October leaves in 1995, dressed for Halloween. Sledding that winter. The bright yellow-greens of Spring in the courtyard at Sacred Heart.


Memories that taste like the August blueberries we picked and the Michigan Cherries she loved. The smell of her chocolate chip cookies.

Memories of the sounds of her kitchen, when so many gathered around her counter, on chairs, on couches, and crowded into the laughter of generations; in the cacophony of barking dogs and crying babies.

And so, when the new cancer frontier begins to seem like just so much heartless chemistry, I think of her - and the way she fought to keep making memories. That it's not just chemistry.

And yet too often, much like six years ago, we know fights will be lost.

Even in that, I think there's a bittersweet comfort.

I hope she was thinking about when her life was green on the vine. That she was remembering summer cherries and July moons and her first date. The she could feel that small hand in hers on halloween, walking among the leaves.

And I wonder, in the end, if the best measure of comfort has nothing to do with chemistry.

It's the comfort of a life lived, green on the vine. Of summers and kisses and Octobers and tiny hands held. Of crazy kitchens and an adoring family.

Of bliss.

It's God's own sweet, sweet, medicine.

Strawberry Wine.