MISS GARDEN GROVE Sarah Bui, Festival Association Scott Weimer and Garden Grove Mayor Steve Jones with the special commemorative cake topping the strawberry shortcake handed out at the 2018 Strawberry Festival (Orange County Tribune photos).

The expression puzzled me, at first.

A neighbor, observing the mini-forest in our backyard, remarked, “That’s a nice volunteer.”

A what? “A volunteer tree.” That, I learned, it refers to a tree that springs up from a dropped seedling without any human intervention.
There’s a lot of literature (on line and elsewhere) about how to remove, kill or just complain about such a cheeky growth.

To put it another way, they’re just not sufficiently appreciated.

But, in our case, the “volunteer” popped up in a gap in our tree line. What had looked like the smile of the an ice hockey player right after winning a rough face-off became the junior member of our choir of Mother Nature.

My point – and I do have one – is that “volunteers” can fill a gap in a community without getting paid, without much recognition and even appreciation from the folks who benefit from their work.

I am reminded of this because of the all-volunteer Garden Grove Strawberry Festival Association, which organizes one of the biggest community events in the western United States. It is in the process of unveiling another event that has transcended all the changes that have come to the community, and has outlived one of the deadliest epidemic in modern history.

So, if you’re one of the estimated 250,000 people who will watch the parade (in person or on TV), ride the rides, eat the many strawberry-themed desserts or just stroll around the grounds enjoying the “county fair” atmosphere that has largely disappeared from our modern, too-hectic world, send a kind thought to those middle-aged (and etc.) folks in the red polo shirts and blazers who made this annual gift to you possible.