Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie

Quite possibly one of the best things about this time of the year is that it is time for homemade strawberry-rhubarb pie! It amazes me how you can take total opposites-one so bitter and one so sweet, wrap them up in some pie dough, add some sugar, and out from the oven a short time later comes a most heavenly tasting, gooey, piping-hot blend that has, at times, forced me to sit down with a fork and just keep eating pieces one right after another. This pie even works for those who might not like strawberries or those who might not like rhubarb because for some reason by mixing them together one enhances the other. Gone is the bitterness of the rhubarb. Instead the rhubarb seems to add just a bit more flavor to the strawberries making the wait for the pie to bake a bit hard to take! My mother had a strawberry patch that ran along the side of our home in her rock garden out in the country. The problem with a strawberry patch is that many times most of the strawberries never make it inside the house due to kids sitting and picking them and eating them one right after another. That's what we did. Thinking back to when we'd sit in the grass in front of those delicious red berries with a warm summer breeze making the day even more perfect, with birds chirping and the sound of tractors pulling wagons out in the hayfields, life was the best it could get for kids happy to be back wearing shorts and anticipating the long, hot summer ahead. Of course that all changed once we went inside the house with the evidence all over us that we'd been eating strawberries again. Now whenever I bite into a strawberry-rhubarb pie I hear my mother telling me to stay away from the strawberry patch. That was a very hard thing to do. It proved to be impossible!