Strawberry Sightings

Have you ever read Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life? If not, you should. It's quite enjoyable, light reading. One of the entries is about marshmallows. The author and her friend had randomly declared it to be The Week of The Marshmallow and throughout the week unexpected marshmallow events kept occurring. Her thought was that the universe somehow presents you with what you're looking for. I look for strawberries. And these are some of my recent strawberry sightings.

On Sunday I followed a link that turned out to be, meh, not really that interesting to me. I hated to see it be a wasted click, since it had been such an effort ;) so I started scrolling to the right to see bridges I might actually travel on. After several seconds I realized the scale of the map was really tiny and I had only scrolled from California into Arizona. Sheesh. I stopped and the first town my eye landed on was Strawberry Hills.

A couple of weeks ago we were watching Elf (yes, in January) for the millionth time and suddenly I noticed a store in the background of Mary Steenburgen's scene. It was called Strawberry, with a red and green neon strawberry in place of the "a." I had never seen it before.

I walked past the storage closet at Katie's ballet school and glanced in as I hurried by. I hope Miss Linda will forgive me for this, but it was a WRECK. Two steps past the closet, I stopped and thought for a second, then turned back to look back in. Sure enough, in the midst of the cleaning supplies, old papers, old costumes and old who-knows-what-else, was a coffee mug with a big strawberry painted on the side.

When we were in Oregon for our Christmas vacation, we drove from the airport in Portland down to where Scott's family lived. It's about a 90 minute drive down the interstate. Like any interstate, it has bridges crossing over it. The only one that I looked up and saw--coming and going--was labeled "Strawberry Lane."

I ordered a little something for my niece's Christmas gift from this lady. When it arrived, her return address label had a strawberry on it. I felt an instant kinship with her.

When we went to see Enchanted in the theater on the day after Thanksgiving, we had to stand in line to get into the theater. We were surrounded by lots of kids. Lots of loud, squirmy kids. There were exactly three who weren't getting on my nerves. My two and a little girl of about four who was standing with her mom and siblings. As the usher-type teenager moved the velvet rope that had been (miraculously) restraining the crowd, the little girl turned to me, made eye contact for the first time and said, "I like your bracelet." (I was wearing my strawberry bracelet, which I wear everywhere.) I just knew there was something about that kid I liked.

Another time I will tell you about the day that the universe wanted to talk about cheesecake.