Fishing is mostly about timing. Time it right and you walk away with enough fish to feed the neighborhood. Cookers full of lightly breaded filets so tender they melt in your mouth. Homemade coleslaw. Hush puppies, some with and some without jalapeños. Enough sweet tea to wash it all down and fill your plate again.

Time it wrong and you spend your day picking strawberries.

The wind has been brutal all week long. The temperatures have been bearable, but certainly unpleasant. The fish have been uncooperative. Even the alligators disappeared and went back into hibernation. Our timing this year has been, to put it mildly, off.

This outcome is especially heinous due to the fact that just days before driving more interstate miles than I care to count, we caught more fish in two hours behind Marion’s house in Georgia than the six of us caught here in Florida over the last seven days. It’s not supposed to work that way.

We got so desperate yesterday, our last day with the boat rental, that when we ran into Mr. Eddie “Spiderman” McGriff again at the boat ramp, we followed him out into the lake and anchored close enough to spy on him with our binoculars. When he moved, we moved. When he set up behind a tall stand of grass, we did the same. We even waited until he left one of his spots and moved in on it like buzzards on roadkill.

But catching fish just wasn’t meant to be for us on this trip. So, on this last day, instead of fishing, we drove out to Buffum Farms to pick strawberries.

Picking fresh strawberries is therapy for exhausted, disappointed fisher-people.

It’s kind of like the age old adage that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Only in this case it’s more like, when life drowns all your minnows and leaves your bucket empty…when it takes all your expectations and smacks them around like a 30 mph gale force wind…when it tangles up your best bobber in the weeds and breaks your line…you go pick strawberries.

The highways in this part of Florida are long, flat, and straight. About every six miles you run into a quick left and right dogleg in the road, then it straightens out again for the next furlong.

The scenery on both sides of the road is sad. Thousands of acres of orange groves have succumbed to the invasive citrus greening bacteria. Decades of ancestral blood poured out on family farms where lifeless and scarred trees stand like tombstones for as far as the eye can see.

Timing can make or break you if you produce oranges for a living. A cold spell hits at the wrong time. An invasive insect from Asia makes its way to the Florida citrus groves and at a time when no one saw it coming, it basically burns their lives to the ground. I don’t know anything about what these barren fields really mean, but I feel for the families that do know.

The timing has to stink.

The drive to Buffum Farms takes a little less than an hour. When we got close and turned onto Lake Buffum Road, all five vehicles immediately in front of us made the turn ahead of us.

“Looks like everybody is going to pick strawberries,” someone said from the back seat.

And, sure enough, as the strawberry fields and farm sign came into view, six lefthand blinkers all came on together in a choreographed rush to get parked and make a dash for the port-a-potty.

If you ever visit Buffum Farms, you have a choice in how you gather up your strawberries. You can buy them by the tray already picked. Fresh. Plump. Deliciously red. The trays are bigger than a place mat and deeper than a casserole dish. Piled high. About twenty-one bucks a tray, and that’s a lot of strawberries.

Or you can grab a small bucket and go pick your own.

We enjoy the picking because we can eat while we pick. This is not stealing. The Buffum Farm folks encourage their patrons to pick and enjoy the fruits of their labor. It takes only two of these buckets to fill up one of the trays, so you get an idea about comparative volume. And one bucket is only seven bucks.

Marion and I bought five buckets.

The therapy is working.

Strawberries in this part of Florida actually get ready to pick by early December. The winter months on a farm like this one are spent harvesting for commercial sales. The strawberries that you and I buy at the local store, I assume could easily have come from here, or some other place in Florida like it.

Buffum Farms thrives on the winter season sales. The U-Pick season that begins in mid March is just a way to clean up the leftover fruit and make a few extra bucks on not letting the remaining crop go to waste.

But the timing stung this year.

Back in February, right near the end of the commercial season, this part of Florida dipped down to 24° for a few nights. The normal winter temperature here is more like 53°. Once in a blue moon they might see the high 30’s. But this year…

The timing couldn’t have been worse.

I’m gonna guess and say that we were walking through a 60 acre strawberry field. Laser straight rows of raised beds. Lots of berries, but most of them had turned to mush. We had to be persistent to find the good ones. And I couldn’t help but think while picking that I was witness to a huge crop loss for Buffum Farms, wondering how they must be doing the best they can to make lemonade out of lemons, or strawberries.

I know for a fact they made some strawberry ice cream. While the gals were paying for sacks of strawberries, onions, potatoes, jams, and honey…I sat in a rocking chair under the barn roof and ate a cup for the sake of the therapeutic experience.

“This is good,” I told Marion. “But they can’t beat the ice cream at Gregg Farms back home.”

I felt better about the fishing on the ride back to camp. Somehow, looking at miles of dead orange trees helped to put things into perspective. It actually brought a lot of things in my life into focus. Loss. Luck. Good fortune. Hard times. Raising children. Aging parents. Prayer. Hospital rooms. Church.

Anything and everything can change in a heartbeat. Whatever comes along in life can alter the outcome depending on how the timing plays out.

We always tend to say that the timing is awful when the outcome leads to hardship. We say that the timing is perfect whenever life goes well.

But the truth is that all of life runs on a Sense of Timing that is seldom so trivial as a bad day of fishing. The mystery is always greater than the inadequate assumptions of our feeble speculations.

I may not deserve the bad days, but neither do I deserve the good ones.

Perfect rain. Perfect sunshine.

They both come at the perfect time.