Strawberry Sayings And Quotes

He wanted to give her another word to say, something like luscious or whisper or strawberry. Hell, antidisestablishmentarianism would do it.

It's just another of Robin's sayings. Like, 'Holy strawberries, Batman, we're in a jam! Or, Holy Kleenex, Batman, it was right under our nose and we blew it!

I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough." "Waiting for perfect love?" "No, even I know better than that. I'm looking for selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you're doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don't want it anymore and throw it out the window. That's what I'm looking for.

I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all.” “Wow,” I said. “Did the search pay off?” “That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.” “Waiting for the perfect love?” “No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.” “I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement. “It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are time in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.” “Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?” “Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?” “So then what?” “So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.” “Sounds crazy to me.” “Well, to me, that’s what love is…

Ryodan says softly, “Holy strawberries, Dani, we’re in a jam.” I look at him like he’s sprouted two heads. Holy strawberries? In a jam? Even Barrons looks stumped. He continues, “But don’t worry. Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods—you really butchered that one, by the way—I’ve got it in the bag. How about this one: holy borrowing bibliophile, let’s book.

This is really good,” Donovan Caine said, attacking his third strawberry pancake. “You sound surprised,” I said. He shrugged. “I just didn’t think an assassin would be able to cook like this.” “Well, I do get lots of practice with knives. You could say I’m multitasking.” The detective froze, his fork halfway to his mouth. “I’m kidding. I enjoy cooking. It relaxes me.

At the beginning of the semester, when you asked who I loved the most, an image of my mother popped in my head. When you asked me who I loved the most for the second time, it wasn’t an image of my mother. Instead, it was replaced by an image of a strawberry blonde with big, blue eyes. It took me a long time to figure out the exact moment I fell in love with her, partly because I denied that I did until it was too late. I fucked up so badly and did so many things wrong, to the point of no return, so I let her go. The selfless part inside of me wants to say I did the right thing, and the selfish part of me thinks I made the biggest mistake of my life. I guess the selfless side won out because, every time I look at her and see what I did, I realize I don’t deserve her. I was never supposed to fall in love with her, but that was the best mistake of my life. I will always love her; I have ever since I purposely bumped into her in the hallway.

Ryodan says softly, “Holy strawberries, Dani, we’re in a jam.

Gintoki: Listen up! Let’s say you drink too much strawberry milk, and have to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, but it’s cold outside your bed. You don’t want to get up, but the urge to urinate is just too strong! You make up your mind to go! You run to the bathroom, stand in front of the toilet, and let loose! You think that all your life has led to this moment! But then you realize. It isn’t the bathroom! You’re still in bed! That feeling of lukewarm wetness spreads like wildfire! But you don’t stop! You can’t stop! That’s what I’m talking about! That’s the truth of the strawberry milk! Do you get it?

I smack myself in the forehead. “Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods, they’re not moving!” I exclaim. There’s a choking noise over my head somewhere. “Etruscan snoods?” I glow quietly inside. Some accomplishments mean more than others. I am officially the Shit. Now and forever. “Dude, watch your question marks. I just pried one out of you.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Admit it, you lost your eternal fecking composure.” “You have an obsession with a delusion about how I end my sentences. What the fuck are Etruscan snoods?” “Dunno. It’s just another of Robin’s sayings. Like, ‘Holy strawberries, Batman, we’re in a jam!’ ” “Strawberries.” “Or, ‘Holy Kleenex, Batman, it was right under our nose and we blew it!’

You’ve gotta taste the light, like my friend and fellow shooter Chip Maury says. And when you see light like this, trust me, it’s like a strawberry sundae with sprinkles.

Tatiana is a ridiculously curvy thing of dreams, with smooth succulent thighs, long strawberry blond cascading beneath a teal bandana, and a nympho sparkle in her eyes that says pick me, lick me, spank me, or I punish you. Raw innocence and mayhem at once.

Baz has stopped glaring at Penelope and started glaring at me. “What on earth are you drinking, Snow?” “A Unicorn Frappuccino.” He frowns. “Why’s it called that—does it taste like lavender?” “It tastes like strawberry Dip Dab,” I say. Penny’s grimacing at Baz. “For heaven’s snakes, Basil, I can’t believe you know what unicorns taste like.” “Shut up, Bunce, it was sustainably farmed.” “Unicorns can talk!” “They’re only capable of small talk; it’s not like eating a dolphin.” Baz takes my Frappuccino and sucks down a huge gulp. “Disgusting.” He hands it back to me. “Not like a unicorn at all.

Harry’s smile twitches at the corner. “I like that one,” he drawls in protest. “I chose him specifically.” Louis looks up. “Him?” “Aloysius.” “Aloysius,” Louis repeats in a deadpan. “You named a shriveled strawberry Aloysius.” Harry shines proudly, looking up to meet Louis’ gaze. “Yeah,” he nods with bright eyes and a half-smile. “Right then. Just checking,” Louis says, and offers his palm.

We youths say “like” all the time because we mistrust reality.

Strawberry milk,” I say, eyeing him as we head toward the counter. “Really.” He turns to me. “Do you have something to say about my snack selections?” “Nope.” I fall into line behind him. “I just didn’t realize you were a middle-school girl going to a slumber party.” “And I,” he says, plunking his strawberry-fest down on the counter, “didn’t realize you were a soccer mom justifying her chocolate craving with the fact that raisins are a fruit.

Now then Captain" He turned back to Grim "Your have questions, I answers, shall we see if they match?" "Please" Grim said "I appear to be your guest, have I you to thank for caring for me?" Ferrus' shoulders sagged in evident disappointment "Oh.... apparently they do not match... I was going to say strawberries!

The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else. [S]he wanted only her own strawberry farm, the fragrance of the fields and the cedar trees, and to live simply in this place forever. [S]he had fallen into loving him long before she knew herself, though it occurred to her now that she might never know herself, that perhaps no one ever does, that such a thing might not be possible. [Y]ou should learn to say nothing that will cause you regret. You should not say what is not in your heart -- or what is only in your heart for a moment. But you know this -- silence is better.

You can't live on nothing." "I can live on sunlight falling across little bridges. I can live on the Botticelli-blue cornflower pattern on the out-billowing garments of the attendant to Aphrodite and the pattern of strawberry blossoms and the little daisies in the robe of Primavera. I can live on the doves flying (he says) in cohorts from the underside of the faded gilt of the balcony of Saint Mark's cathedral and the long corridors of the Pitti Palace. I can gorge myself on Rome and the naked Bacchus and the face like a blasted lightning-blasted white birch that is some sort of Fury.

The "Holy-crap-that's-a-lot-of-pink" Zone would have been a more accurate description. I don't know what I was expecting a vampire's room to look like. Maybe lots of black, a bunch of books by Camus...oh, and a sensitive portrait of the only human the vamp had ever loved, who had no doubt died of something beautiful and tragic, thus dooming the vamp to an eternity of moping and sighing romantically. What can I say? I read a lot of books. But this room looked like it had been decorated by the unholy lovechild of Barbie and Strawberry Shortcake.

I used to think that I needed to be part of a story, a big story, one with trials and villains and temptations and rewards. That's how I would conquer it, conquer death." She sighed again, and nestled in closer to me. "All that matters, in the end, is the little things. The way Mim says my name to wake me up in the morning. The way Bee's hand feels in mine. The way the sun cast my shadow across the yard yesterday. The way your cheeks flush when we kiss. The smell of hay and the taste of strawberries and the feel of fresh black dirt between my toes. This is what matters, Midnight.

Oh. Darrow. I remembered. No more Truffle Pig. She hates it. Says it’s demeaning to her other contributions and athletic stature.” “Uh-huh. Well. She doesn’t get to choose her own callsign.” “Of course not. I was thinking Strawberry Lass. No? Crow Whisperer? Red Rabbit?” “We’ll figure it out later.” I have a thought. “What do they call baby eagles?” He acts like he’s just seen a puppy. “Eaglet. Oh gods. She’ll die.

But Ma says everyone deserves forgiveness. That's why if Ma was a color, she'd be pink with her sweetness. A tender flower, a bubbly pop of chewing gum, two scoops of strawberry ice cream. Silly in her girly ways, her color deepens with love, until she glows fuchsia - bright and bold, unstoppable. But when she is not fed the riches that life promises, Ma pales, reaming but a tint above white, a color aching in want." -Claudia

Evan …” she murmured, wrapping her soft arms around his neck. Their position had her lips near his ear. She’d lost her headband somewhere. He could smell the strawberry of her shampoo, feel the tickle of her sluggish breath stirring his hair. “Evan.” “Kelsey. Move over here, lie down.” She pulled back slightly, her bleary eyes trying to focus on his. The weight of her head still seemed too much for her neck to support and her hair flowed over his arm. “Evan, I always liked you.” “I always liked you, too, honey.” The way she kept saying his name in that intoxicated purr, savoring the v between her teeth and her bottom lip, was unnerving. Unnerving, hell. It had his dick twitching in his pants. “Come on, girl, you need to sleep it off.” “I mean I like liked you.” […] Her hands caught his face, surprising him. He should have moved away from her long ago, before she could get her hands on him. As it was, he felt like a fly caught in the sticky gossamer of a spider’s den. “Always wanted to fuck you, y’know that? Even when I was a virgin.” He drew in a breath, exhaled it shakily. So much for prudish. Note to self: Kelsey now gets unbelievably horny when drunk.

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember. The wild roses flower in the woods. Your hand is torn on the bushes gathering the mulberries and strawberries you refresh yourself with. You run to catch the young hares you flay with stones from the rocks to cut them up and eat all hot and bleeding. You know how to avoid meeting a bear on the track. You know the winter fear when you hear the wolves gathering. But you can remain seated for hours in the treetops to await morning. You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

He's not good enough for you." "What?" I stared at him incredulously. "I'd say you have that backwords. He's from a good family. Iam not" His fingers slid away from mine. A swallow darted past us. "So if you'll excuse me, I have to go convince his mother that I'm not a desperate fortune hunter with a liar for a mother an a disgusting talent for drugging old ladies." "No" I frowned. "What do you mean, no?Whats the matter with you?" He just stepped closer to me, right on my shadow, which had been the only thing between us. His eyes were angry and conflicted but his hands were gently on my face, wrapping around the back of my neck. He pilled slightly and i stumbled forward. His mouth closed over mine, the kiss sending warmth shooting all the way from my belly down into my knees. His tongue was bold, sliding over mine as if I were strawberry ice cream. I felt devoured, delicious, decadent. He stopped abruptly, pulling back, his breath ragged. "I'm not good enough for you either.

So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all.” -“Wow,” I said. “Did the search pay off?” “That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.” -“Waiting for the perfect love?” “No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.” -“I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement. “It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are time in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.” -“Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?” “Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?” -“So then what?” “So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.” -“Sounds crazy to me.” “Well, to me, that’s what love is…

I'll give them my number, too. And my brother Vishous made sure we have the best reception and service in the city. No dead zones. Unless you're around Lassiter, and that's more of a mental thing than anything about cellular networks." "Um ... Lassiter?" Bitty said. Rhage nodded. "Yeah, he's this pain in the ass--oh, shit--I mean, sorry, I shouldn't say ass around you, should I? Or shit. And all those other bad words." He poked himself in the head. "I gotta remember that, gotta remember that. Anyway, Lassiter's a fallen angel who we've somehow gotten stuck with. He's like gum on the bottom of your shoe. 'Cept he doesn't smell like strawberries, he hogs the T.V. remote, and on a regular basis. you think to yourself, Is that really the best the Creator could do with an immortal? The guy has the worst taste in television--I mean, the only saving grace is that he isn't addicted to Bonanza ...have you ever watched twelve straight hours of Saved by the Bell? Okay, fine, it was probably only seven, and it wasn't like I couldn't have left--my God, I tell you, though, it's a wonder I escaped with my ability to put my pants on one leg at a time still intact ...

What you’re saying is this spider, with a brain the size of strawberry seed, hid in your car with its face covered to avoid being gassed by insect spray.” He stood in front of me, laughing, peering down into my eyes. “And then, when the fumes dispersed, he set about plotting revenge. Once he’d come up with his plan, he exited your car and, even though he didn’t see which direction you went in, he found the front door because he knew you were inside this house.” Biting down on his bottom lip, Ric smirked. “Don’t you think, if he was as smart as all that, he’d have worn a mask before he ran out from under visor so you couldn’t recognise him on your doormat?

I sat there listening to him talk and talk and I realised something really important. I thought I was in love with him for all those years but it turned out I was in love with the idea of William. The actual reality was a bit of an anti-climax. I thought, well, William would never shove the word WAG into pop songs to make me laugh and he wouldn’t bite the chocolate off chocolate-covered strawberries for me and he’d never, ever watch a film with Sandra Bullock in it, unless it was a Shakespeare adaptation and then he’d spend the entire film listing all the historical inaccuracies and he’d never go down on me for half an hour because he’d lost a game of Scrabble. Point of fact, I can’t imagine William doing anything that would mess up his hair, and he’s started popping the collars of his shirts and have I mentioned that he’s not you? He’s not you, Max, and that’s why I’m actually really pleased that he’s engaged and he’s moving to Warwickshire so I don’t have a constant reminder of what an idiot I’ve been.

Charles—what in the world’s happening at your college? Is there a circus? I’ve seen everything except elephants. I must say the whole of Oxford has become most peculiar suddenly. Last night it was pullulating with women. You’re to come away at once, out of danger. I’ve got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey—which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend. It’s heaven with strawberries.

God Bless Your Fingers Ten sugar-dipped strawberries. Ten humming sailors. Let the church say amen. Let the chapel doors open and open again. Ten gentle explorers who found my body buried inside itself. Who can see in the dark. Who can baptize me from across the continent. Let the church of my legs say bless. Let the church of my breasts say oh god. You have found the presents I hid from you. You have grown in me a basin I can never fill. Ten wise men. Ten pilgrimages across my stomach. Ten lit candles. Ten holy ghosts. I am a séance. I am a séance.

I try not to hate anybody. "Hate is a four-letter word," like the bumper sticker says. But I hate book reviewers. Book reviewers are the most despicable, loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by gnawing apart other people's work. They are human garbage. They all deserve to be struck down by awful diseases described in the most obscure dermatology journals. Book reviewers live in tiny studios that stink of mothballs and rotting paper. Their breath reeks of stale coffee. From time to time they put on too-tight shirts and pants with buckles and shuffle out of their lairs to shove heaping mayonnaise-laden sandwiches into their faces, which are worn in to permanent snarls. Then they go back to their computers and with fat stubby fingers they hammer out "reviews." Periodically they are halted as they burst into porcine squeals, gleefully rejoicing in their cruelty. Even when being "kindly," book reviewers reveal their true nature as condescending jerks. "We look forward to hearing more from the author," a book reviewer might say. The prissy tones sound like a second-grade piano teacher, offering you a piece of years-old strawberry hard candy and telling you to practice more. But a bad book review is just disgusting. Ask yourself: of all the jobs available to literate people, what monster chooses the job of "telling people how bad different books are"? What twisted fetishist chooses such a life?

Now don’t tell anyone,” she says, bustling in and sliding my dinner-table-cum-vanity over my lap. She sets down a paper napkin, plastic fork, and a bowl of fruit that actually looks appetizing, with strawberries, melon, and apple. “I packed it for my break. I’m on a diet. Do you like fruit, Mr. Jankowski?” I would answer except that my hand is over my mouth and it’s trembling. Apple, for God’s sake. She pats my other hand and leaves the room, discreetly ignoring my tears.

Anna?" Someone knocks on my door, and it startles me out of my seat. No.Not someone. St. Clair. I'm wearing an old Mayfield Dairy T-shirt, complete with yellow-and-brown cow logo,and hot pink flannel pajama bottoms covered in giant strawberries. I am not even wearing a bra. "Anna,I know you're in there. I can see your light." "Hold on a sec!" I blurt. "I'll be right there." I grab my black hoodie and zip it up over the cow's face before wrenching open the door. "Hisorryaboutthat. Come in." I open the door wide but he stands there for a moment, just staring at me. I can't read the expression on his face. Then he breaks into a mischievous smile and brushes past me. "Nice strawberries." "Shut up." "No,I mean it. Cute." And even though he doesn't mean it like I-want-to-leave-my-girlfriend-and-start-dating-you cute,something flickers inside of me. The "force of strength and destruction" Tita de la Garza knew so well.St. Clair stands in the center of my room.He scratches his head, and his T-shirt lifts up on one side, exposing a slice of bare stomach. Foomp! My inner fire ignites. "It's really...er...clean," he says. Fizz. Flames extinguished.

July" The figs we ate wrapped in bacon. The gelato we consumed greedily: coconut milk, clove, fresh pear. How we’d dump hot espresso on it just to watch it melt, licking our spoons clean. The potatoes fried in duck fat, the salt we’d suck off our fingers, the eggs we’d watch get beaten ’til they were a dizzying bright yellow, how their edges crisped in the pan. The pink salt blossom of prosciutto we pulled apart with our hands, melted on our eager tongues. The green herbs with goat cheese, the aged brie paired with a small pot of strawberry jam, the final sour cherry we kept politely pushing onto each other’s plate, saying, No, you. But it’s so good. No, it’s yours. How I finally put an end to it, plucked it from the plate, and stuck it in my mouth. How good it tasted: so sweet and so tart. How good it felt: to want something and pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.

Mirabella’s eyes fill with tears, and Billy quickly wipes his mouth. He scoops strawberry tart onto his fork and holds it out. “Here,” he says. “You must try this.” As she takes the bite, he uses his thumb to discreetly wipe the tear that falls down her cheek. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I suppose I haven’t even tried to consider your point of view. It was thoughtless of me.” “It is all right,” Mirabella says. “Does she know that you love her?” Billy raises his eyebrows. “Why would she when I didn’t? It wasn’t like I read in books. A thunderclap. Eyes meeting. Tortured glances. With Arsinoe it was more like . . . having cold water poured down your back and learning to enjoy it.” “And does she love you?” “I don’t know. I think she might.” He smiles. “I hope she does.” “I hope so too.” Another tear slides down her cheek, and Billy darts forward to discreetly hide it. “It is all right,” she says. “They will think I am only crying because of how terrible this strawberry tart is.” Billy sets down his fork, insulted. Then they both begin to laugh.

I think she’s earned a treat,” I say. I snitch three slices of strawberry out of my fruit salad and hand each of the boys a piece to feed her.

The one thing she did say was she thought you were destined for bigger things. She didn’t want to stand in your way. Olive was her dream. She didn’t want to derail yours.

Perhaps as one gets older one takes one's joys altruistically,"said John, in turn thinking aloud. "I must say though I sometimes wish I could get it selfishly, just for myself, as Gay used to give me, when I was young." Lady Emily found nothing to say. John's last words fell dead on her heart. It terrified her that he could speak of his youth as a perished thing.

How can you love me?” she asked, forcing herself to say the words that would kill the tenderness in his eyes. “You don’t even know me. You know ‘Lady Agatha,’ a composite, a character, a role I played.” He shook his head, his negation gentle but certain. “I didn’t fall in love with a character, a title, or an occupation. I didn’t fall in love with you because of your past or despite it. “I love you because of your intensity and passion, because you make me want to be better than I am, because seeing my reflection in your eyes makes me better than I am. I love you because you laugh easily and honestly. I love you because you carried an ugly mutt into a drawing room as though it were a prince and because you gave an old soldier a strawberry trifle. I love you, Letty.

No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.

Do I need to check up on you guys later? You know the rules.No sleeping in opposite-sex rooms." My face flames,and St. Clair's cheeks grow blotchy. It's true.It's a rule. One that my brain-my rule-loving, rule-abiding brain-conveniently blocked last night. It's also one notoriously ignored by the staff. "No,Nate," we say. He shakes his shaved head and goes back in his apartment. But the door opens quickly again,and a handful of something is thrown at us before it's slammed back shut. Condoms.Oh my God, how humiliating. St. Clair's entire face is now bright red as he picks the tiny silver squares off the floor and stuffs them into his coat pockets. We don't speak,don't even look at each other,as we climb the stairs to my floor. My pulse quickens with each step.Will he follow me to my room,or has Nate ruined any chance of that? We reach the landing,and St. Clair scratches his head. "Er..." "So..." "I'm going to get dressed for bed. Is that all right?" His voice is serious,and he watches my reaction carefully. "Yeah.Me too.I'm going to...get ready for bed,too." "See you in a minute?" I swell with relief. "Up there or down here?" "Trust me,you don't want to sleep in my bed." He laughs,and I have to turn my face away,because I do,holy crap do I ever. But I know what he means.It's true my bed is cleaner. I hurry to my room and throw on the strawberry pajamas and an Atlanta Film Festival shirt. It's not like I plan on seducing him. Like I'd even know how. St. Clair knocks a few minutes later, and he's wearing his white bottoms with the blue stripes again and a black T-shirt with a logo I recognize as the French band he was listening to earlier. I'm having trouble breathing. "Room service," he says. My mind goes...blank. "Ha ha," I say weakly. He smiles and turns off the light. We climb into bed,and it's absolutely positively completely awkward. As usual. I roll over to my edge of the bed. Both of us are stiff and straight, careful not to touch the other person. I must be a masochist to keep putting myself in these situations. I need help. I need to see a shrink or be locked in a padded cell or straitjacketed or something. After what feels like an eternity,St. Clair exhales loudly and shifts. His leg bumps into mine, and I flinch. "Sorry," he says. "It's okay." "..." "..." "Anna?" "Yeah?" "Thanks for letting me sleep here again. Last night..." The pressure inside my chest is torturous. What? What what what? "I haven't slept that well in ages." The room is silent.After a moment, I roll back over. I slowly, slowly stretch out my leg until my foot brushes his ankle. His intake of breath is sharp. And then I smile,because I know he can't see my expression through the darkness.

It’s because she doesn’t have eyelashes,” Daisy said. Iris turned to her with complete calm and said, “I hate you.” “That’s a terrible thing to say, Daisy,” Honoria said, turning on her with a stern expression. It was true that Iris was extraordinarily pale, with the kind of strawberry blond hair that seemed to render her lashes and brows almost invisible. But she’d always thought Iris was absolutely gorgeous, almost ethereal-looking. “If she didn’t have eyelashes, she’d be dead,” Sarah said. Honoria turned to her, unable to believe the direction of the conversation. Well, no, that was not completely accurate. She believed it (unfortunately). She just didn’t understand it. “Well, it’s true,” Sarah said defensively. “Or at the very least, blind. Lashes keep all the dust from our eyes.” “Why are we having this conversation?” Honoria wondered aloud. Daisy immediately answered, “It’s because Sarah said she didn’t think Iris could look venomous, and then I said—" “I know,” Honoria cut in, and then, when she realized Daisy still had her mouth open, looking as if she was only waiting for the right moment to complete her sentence, she said it again. “I know. It was a hypothetical question.” “It still had a perfectly valid answer,” Daisy said with a sniff.

Wild Peaches" When the world turns completely upside down You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore; We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color. Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor, We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown. The winter will be short, the summer long, The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong; All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all. The squirrels in their silver fur will fall Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot. 2 The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold. The misted early mornings will be cold; The little puddles will be roofed with glass. The sun, which burns from copper into brass, Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass. Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover; A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year; The spring begins before the winter’s over. By February you may find the skins Of garter snakes and water moccasins Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear. 3 When April pours the colors of a shell Upon the hills, when every little creek Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell, When strawberries go begging, and the sleek Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak, We shall live well — we shall live very well. The months between the cherries and the peaches Are brimming cornucopias which spill Fruits red and purple, sombre-bloomed and black; Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback. 4 Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones There’s something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There’s something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones. I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray, Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves; That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath, Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

Percy gripped his leather necklace. " I started to remember in Portland, after the gorogon's blood. It's been coming back to me slowly since then. There is another camp __ Camp Half-Blood." Just saying the name made Percy feel warm inside. Good memories washed over him: the smell of strawberry fields in the warm summer sun, fireworks lightning up the beach on the Fourth of July, satyrs playing panpipes at the nightly campfire, and a kiss at the bottom of the canoe lake

Mme Verdurin asked him: "Did you have some of my orangeade?" Whereupon M. de Charlus, with a gracious smile, in a crystalline tone which he rarely adopted, and with endless simperings and wrigglings of the hips, replied: "No, I preferred its neighbour, which is strawberry-juice, I think. It's delicious."[...]But on hearing M. de Charlus say, in that shrill voice and with that smile and those gestures, "No, I preferred its neighbour, the strawberry-juice," one could say: "Ah, he likes the stronger sex,"[...]

If you could design a new structure for Camp Half-Blood what would it be? Annabeth: I’m glad you asked. We seriously need a temple. Here we are, children of the Greek gods, and we don’t even have a monument to our parents. I’d put it on the hill just south of Half-Blood Hill, and I’d design it so that every morning the rising sun would shine through its windows and make a different god’s emblem on the floor: like one day an eagle, the next an owl. It would have statues for all the gods, of course, and golden braziers for burnt offerings. I’d design it with perfect acoustics, like Carnegie Hall, so we could have lyre and reed pipe concerts there. I could go on and on, but you probably get the idea. Chiron says we’d have to sell four million truckloads of strawberries to pay for a project like that, but I think it would be worth it. Aside from your mom, who do you think is the wisest god or goddess on the Olympian Council? Annabeth: Wow, let me think . . . um. The thing is, the Olympians aren’t exactly known for wisdom, and I mean that with the greatest possible respect. Zeus is wise in his own way. I mean he’s kept the family together for four thousand years, and that’s not easy. Hermes is clever. He even fooled Apollo once by stealing his cattle, and Apollo is no slouch. I’ve always admired Artemis, too. She doesn’t compromise her beliefs. She just does her own thing and doesn’t spend a lot of time arguing with the other gods on the council. She spends more time in the mortal world than most gods, too, so she understands what’s going on. She doesn’t understand guys, though. I guess nobody’s perfect. Of all your Camp Half-Blood friends, who would you most like to have with you in battle? Annabeth: Oh, Percy. No contest. I mean, sure he can be annoying, but he’s dependable. He’s brave and he’s a good fighter. Normally, as long as I’m telling him what to do, he wins in a fight. You’ve been known to call Percy “Seaweed Brain” from time to time. What’s his most annoying quality? Annabeth: Well, I don’t call him that because he’s so bright, do I? I mean he’s not dumb. He’s actually pretty intelligent, but he acts so dumb sometimes. I wonder if he does it just to annoy me. The guy has a lot going for him. He’s courageous. He’s got a sense of humor. He’s good-looking, but don’t you dare tell him I said that. Where was I? Oh yeah, so he’s got a lot going for him, but he’s so . . . obtuse. That’s the word. I mean he doesn’t see really obvious stuff, like the way people feel, even when you’re giving him hints, and being totally blatant. What? No, I’m not talking about anyone or anything in particular! I’m just making a general statement. Why does everyone always think . . . agh! Forget it. Interview with GROVER UNDERWOOD, Satyr What’s your favorite song to play on the reed pipes?

Food prepared with a light heart and in a happy frame of mind is often the best food. Preparing the special foods that are favorites of those you love... making just a little effort to garnish the salad with a sprig of parsley, a bit of grated cheese, or a wild strawberry from the nearby meadow. This says "you cared enough to do the little extra things." This makes cooking pleasant and satisfying. Make the food look as pretty as it is good to eat. -Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book, revised and enlarged (1956)

You seem to like pink,” I said. “Grandfather likes it. He says I look pretty in pink.” “You do,” I said. And she did. Chubby girls in pink tend to conjure up images of big strawberry shortcakes waltzing on a dance floor, but in her case the color suited her.

Reynaud's visit had made me want to go and see my wood again. I like saying that. My wood. My strawberry clearing. My path. My trees. My fence. My wishing well. Those things are mine now, Reynaud said. Not Roux's, not Maman's, but mine. Mine to do what I like in. Sometimes all I want to do is be alone; to sing, to shout, to run about, to talk to myself in my shadow-voice. And now I can do that whenever I want. The wood, the clearing, and the well- they are all mine to play with. I am no longer a trespasser. I am the guardian of a sacred place.

The girl with the short strawberry-blond hair was in front of her. She cast a glance back at Cassie and faced the front again. Cassie wanted to say hi, but the thought of speaking out loud when no one had called on her made her throat go dry. Instead she planned what she would say

It’s true I’ve got a cold streak. I recognize that. But if they—my father and mother—had loved me a little more, I would have been able to feel more—to feel real sadness, for example.” “Do you think you weren’t loved enough?” She tilted her head and looked at me. Then she gave a sharp, little nod. “Somewhere between ‘not enough’ and ‘not at all.’ I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it—to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once. But they never gave that to me. Never, not once. If I tried to cuddle up and beg for something, they’d just shove me away and yell at me. ‘No! That costs too much!’ It’s all I ever heard. So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I was still in elementary school at the time—fifth or sixth grade—but I made up my mind once and for all.” “Wow,” I said. “And did your search pay off?” “That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.” “Waiting for the perfect love?” “No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.” “I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement. “It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are times in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.” “Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?” “Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. ‘Now I see, Midori. What a fool I’ve been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate mousse? Cheesecake?’” “So then what?” “So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.” “Sounds crazy to me.” “Well, to me, that’s what love is. Not that anyone can understand me, though.” Midori gave her head a little shake against my shoulder. “For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesn’t begin at all.” “I’ve never met a girl who thinks like you.

At the Minsk tractor factory I was looking for a woman who had served in the army as a sniper. She had been a famous sniper. The newspapers from the front had written about her more than once. Her Moscow girlfriends gave me her home phone number, but it was old. And the last name I had noted down was her maiden name. I went to the factory where I knew she worked in the personnel department, and I heard from the men (the director of the factory and the head of the personnel department): “Aren’t there enough men? What do you need these women’s stories for? Women’s fantasies…” The men were afraid that women would tell about some wrong sort of war. I visited a family…Both husband and wife had fought. They met at the front and got married there: “We celebrated our wedding in the trench. Before the battle. I made a white dress for myself out of a German parachute.” He had been a machine gunner, she a radio operator. The man immediately sent his wife to the kitchen: “Prepare something for us.” The kettle was already boiling, and the sandwiches were served, she sat down with us, but the husband immediately got her to her feet again: “Where are the strawberries? Where are our treats from the country?” After my repeated requests, he reluctantly relinquished his place, saying: “Tell it the way I taught you. Without tears and women’s trifles: how you wanted to be beautiful, how you wept when they cut off your braid.” Later she whispered to me: “He studied The History of the Great Patriotic War with me all last night. He was afraid for me. And now he’s worried I won’t remember right. Not the way I should.” That happened more than once, in more than one house.

...It balances out my flaw of being too modest about my incredible dance moves.” “Um, nice try.” “Besides, I gotta believe we’re a good team because we make each other’s fatal flaws into slightly less fatal flaws. Like, maybe even fatal strengths.” She squeezed my hand. “That doesn’t even make sense, Seaweed Brain. But I appreciate the thought. So you’re saying I shouldn’t feel guilty?” “None of us should. Grover’s fatal flaw is apparently strawberry milkshakes, right? But sometimes life gives you strawberry milkshakes. Then you gotta count on your friends to look out for you. We’re a team. How many times have you propped me up?” “I’ve lost count.” “Exactly.

What I mean to say is that you can make a choice, be reasonably satisfied with it, and still regret that which you did not choose. Maybe it's like ordering dessert. You have it narrowed down to either a warm peanut butter torte or strawberries jubilee. You choose the torte, and it's delicious. But you still wonder about those strawberries...

The view from our garden is spectacular. I thought about people I knew who right at that moment might be plucking chickens, picking strawberries and lettuce, just for us. I felt grateful to the people involved, and the animals also. I don't say this facetiously. I sent my thanks across the county, like any sensible person saying grace before a meal.

I didn’t even know Madge knew Gale,” says Peeta. “We used to sell her strawberries,” I say almost angrily. What am I angry about, though? Not that she has brought the medicine, surely. “She must have quite a taste for them,” says Haymitch. That’s what nettles me. It’s the implication that there’s something going on between Gale and Madge. And I don’t like it.

James Agee. He was born a prince of the language, and so he remains. And Capote. I don't care what kind of stupid ass remarks he makes, he can write; he really can. When he's on he's really on. Updike would be twice the writer he is if he weren't such a hot dog. God knows, he's a word man. Eudora Welty, great writer. Erskine Caldwell, by the way is a helluva lot better than he's ever been given credit for. But if you ask me, "Who's your favorite writer?" there's no answer to that. That's like saying, "What do you like best for breakfast?" Some mornings you want a beer; some mornings you want strawberries; some mornings you want, God help us, Frostie Crispie Flakes with a lot of sugar, and some mornings you want your old lady.

Aware she’d likely never tasted such a thing before, she took a cautious sip. Nothing came up. “The straw’s defective.” Dev shot her a quick grin. It altered his face, turning him strikingly beautiful. But that wasn’t the odd part. The odd part was that seeing him smile made her heart change its rhythm. She lifted her hand a fraction, compelled to trace the curve of his lips, the crease in his cheek. Would he let her, she thought, this man who moved with the liquid grace of a soldier . . . or a beast of prey? “Did I say milk shake?” he said, withheld laughter in his voice. “I meant ice cream smoothie—with enough fresh fruit blended into it to turn it solid.” Glancing at her when she didn’t move, he raised an eyebrow. She felt a wave of heat across her face, and the sensation was so strange, it broke through her fascination. Looking down, she took off the lid after removing the straw and stared at the swirls of pink and white that dominated the delicious-smelling concoction. Intrigued, she poked at it with the tip of her straw. “I can see pieces of strawberry, and what’s that?” She looked more closely at the pink-coated black seeds. “Passion fruit?” “Try it and see.” Handing her his water bottle, he started the car and got them on their way. “How would I know?” She put his water in the holder next to the unopened bottle. “And I need a spoon for this.” Reaching into a pocket, he pulled out a plastic-wrapped piece of cutlery. “Here.” “You did that on purpose,” she accused. “Did you want to see how hard I’d try to suck the mixture up?” Another smile, this one a bare shadow. “Would I do that?” It startled her to realize he was teasing her. Devraj Santos, she thought, wasn’t supposed to have a sense of humor. That was something she just knew. And, it was wrong. That meant the shadow-man didn’t know everything, that he wasn’t omnipotent. A cascade of bubbles sparkled through her veins, bright and effervescent. “I think you’re capable of almost anything.” Dipping in the spoon, she brought the decadent mixture to her lips. Oh! The crisp sting of ice, the cream rich and sweet, the fruit a tart burst of sensation. It was impossible not to take a second bite. And a third.

I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.

I've learnt of deceit, betrayed by my own smile, that ceases to hide, as her name resonates through the empty confines where rationality once resided, in the presence of eyes so deep; the oceans seem shallow, and lips red like summer evening strawberries before a sunset. My body conveys a message, my brain has no time to articulate the same, my heart won this race, pacing.

When I couldn’t take the hunger anymore, I called Taylor and told her everything. She screamed so loud, I had to hold the phone away from my ear. She came right over with a black-bean burrito and a strawberry-banana smoothie. She kept shaking her head and saying, “That Zeta Phi slut.” “It wasn’t just her, it was him, too,” I said, between bites of my burrito. “Oh, I know. Just you wait. I’m gonna drag my nails across his face when I see him. I’ll leave him so scarred, no girl will ever hook up with him again.” She inspected her manicured nails like they were artillery. “When I go to the salon tomorrow, I’m gonna tell Danielle to make them sharp.” My heart swelled. There are some things only a friend who’s known you your whole life can say, and instantly, I felt a little better. “You don’t have to scar him.” “But I want to.” She hooked her pinky finger with mine. “Are you okay?” I nodded. “Better, now that you’re here.” When I was sucking down the last of my smoothie, Taylor asked me, “Do you think you’ll take him back?” I was surprised and really relieved not to hear any judgement to her voice. “What would you do?” I asked her. “It’s up to you.” “I know, but…would you take him back?” “Under ordinary circumstances, no. If some guy cheated on me while we were on a break, if he so much as looked at another girl, no. He’d be donzo.” She chewed on her straw. “But Jeremy’s not some guy. You have a history together.” “What happened to all that talk about scarring him?” “Don’t get it twisted, I hate him to death right now. He effed up in a colossal way. But he’ll never be just some guy, not to you. That’s a fact.” I didn’t say anything. But I knew she was right. “I could still round up my sorority sisters and go slash his tires tonight.” Taylor bumped my shoulder. “Hmm? Whaddyathink?” She was trying to make me laugh. It worked. I laughed for the first time in what felt like a long time.

The Pop-Tarts page is often aflutter. Pop-Tarts, it says as of today (February 8, 2008), were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that's true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Korea. Before that Australia. Several days ago it said: "Pop-Tarts is german for Little Iced Pastry O' Germany." Other things I learned from earlier versions: More than two trillion Pop-Tarts are sold each year. George Washington invented them. They were developed in the early 1960s in China. Popular flavors are "frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon, and semen." Pop-Tarts are a "flat Cookie." No: "Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER notto mention a queer inch." No: "A Pop-Tart is a flat condom." Once last fall the whole page was replaced with "NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI!!!!!

Waiting for the perfect love?” “No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.

young ones with respect for their digestions. “Well, you can’t feed it to them anymore. It’s gone way too high.” Her mouth became a straight line. “Not so high. It’s well-salted; we’ve eaten worse. If it’s that bad, the others would be sick and so would I.” He knew enough about homesteaders of whatever religious persuasion to hear what she was really saying: the sausage was all there was, they ate spoiled sausage or nothing. He nodded and walked back to his own seat. His food was in a cornucopia twisted from sheets of the Cincinnati Commercial, three thick sandwiches of lean beef on dark German bread, a strawberry-jam tart, and two apples that he juggled for a few moments to make the children laugh. When he gave the food to Mrs. Sperber, she opened her mouth as though to protest, but then she closed it. A homesteader’s wife needs a healthy dose of realism. “We are obliged to thee, friend,” she said. Across the aisle, the blond woman watched,

But I do like the church. I like the smell of polished wood and incense. I like the colored window glass and the statue of Saint Francis. Reynaud says Saint Francis is the patron saint of animals, who left his life to live in the woods. I'd like to do that. I'd build myself a house in a tree, and live on nuts and strawberries. Maman and I never go to church. Once, that might have caused trouble. But Reynaud says we don't have to go. Reynaud says God sees us, and cares for us, wherever we are.

Ten minutes after loading up her plate, when Iris is sipping pale apple juice, she asks Els across the table, “I’m told I should make myself useful. What are my options?” Els spears a strawberry. “What can you do?” “I organize.” “Like your sister.” “I organize people, events,” Iris says. “Denise organizes information.” I absorb that. I never thought of myself as organizing anything. I think of myself as listening, coping, avoiding. The words feel good, rolled over in my mind: Denise organizes information.

What do you mean?” I asked. “About not making space.” “What do I mean? Okay, question time. Do you eat vanilla ice cream?” “Um, sure.” “And do you eat strawberry ice cream?” “Yeah, sometimes.” “And do you like both?” he asked. “Sure.” “No you don’t,” he said. “What?” “You’re lying to yourself. A person is only ever allowed to like one flavor of something, one type of something, and if you say you like both types, you’re delusional and wrong and lying and a coward.” I paused. “You see how ridiculous it is?

The review in the newspaper the next day was not very good. But by then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier. One of the things I'd been most afraid of had finally happened, with a whole lot of people watching, and it had indeed been a nightmare. But sitting with all that vulnerability, I discovered I could ride it...Out of nowhere, I remembered something one of my priest friends had said once, that grace is having a commitment to - or at least an acceptance of - being ineffective and foolish. That our bottled charm is the main roadblock to drinking that clear, cool glass of love. I remembered what Grace's stories were all about: self-forgiveness, and taking care of one another. It wasn't far away from Jesus saying to feed his sheep. Now, I'm not positive he meant room service. But maybe he did. So I ate strawberries and melon and cookies, then put on the heat, and got in the tub.

I really doubt my parents are going to let me stay the night in a remote cabin with a bunch of boys.” “Oh, please, Snow White, Mike’s dad’ll be there. He’s actually kinda funny…you know, in a weird dad kind of way. Don’t worry, your purity will remain intact. Scout’s honor.” She made some sort of gesture with her fingers that Violet assumed was supposed to be an oath, but since Chelsea had never actually been a Girl Scout, it ended up looking more like a peace sign. Or something. Violet maintained her dubious expression. But Chelsea wasn’t about to be discouraged, and she tried to be the voice of reason. “Come on, I think Jay’s checking to see if he can get the time off work. The least you can do is ask your parents. If they say no, then no harm, no foul, right? If they say yes, then we’ll have a kick-ass time. We’ll go hiking in the snow and hang out in front of the fireplace in the evening. We’ll sleep in sleeping bags and maybe even roast some marshmallows. It’ll be like we’re camping.” She beamed a superfake smile at Violet and clasped her hands together like she was begging. “Do it for me. Ple-eease.” Jules came back with their milk shake. It was strawberry, and Chelsea flashed Violet an I-told-you-so grin. Violet finished her tea, mulling over the idea of spending the weekend in a snowy cabin with Jay and Chelsea. Away from town. Away from whoever was leaving her dead animals and creepy notes. It did sound fun, and Violet did love the snow. And the woods. And Jay. She could at least ask. Like Chelsea said, No harm, no foul.

Food prepared with a light heart and in a happy frame of mind is often the best food. Preparing the special foods that are favourites of those you love . . . making just a little effort to garnish the salad with a sprig of parsley, a bit of grated cheese, or a wild strawberry from the nearby meadow. This says “you cared enough to do the little extra things.” This makes cooking pleasant and satisfying. Make the food look as pretty as it is good to eat. —Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, revised and enlarged (1956)

after the first time they did not listen. So Sarah tried teaching them words. Pointing to the table, stool, fire, she would say the name slowly and clearly. Then the Indian children said—or tried to say—the words, shouting with laughter when their tongues could not find a way around the strange sounds. They, in turn, showed her where the wild strawberries grew. So she went out and filled a basket with the berries, which were like red jewels in the grass. When John Noble came home with a duck he had shot, or a fish caught in the river, he would find ripe berries waiting, too. They traded with

My mom raised Audrey and me not to care about appearances. She and Dad never talked about how we looked. And I know why she did it—and for my sister, I think it even worked—but the truth is, without makeup and hair dye and nice clothes, my mom has always been stunningly pretty. And my sister looks just like her: big green eyes, gold hair, little pointed chin, petite with curves. I’ve always taken more after Dad. Tall, lanky, with only the faintest strawberry undertone to my generally mousy hair. Maybe it’s easier to say looks don’t matter when you look like Hollywood’s version of a hardworking, outdoorsy woman with a heart of gold.

For the weekend before, we had had a blowout of tarts, a tart bender, tart madness- even, I dare say, a Tart-a-pa-looza, if you will forgive one final usage of the construction before we at last bury that cruelly beaten dead pop-culture horse. Tarte aux Pêches, Tarte aux Limettes, Tarte aux Poires, Tarte aux Cerises. Tarte aux Fromage Frais, both with and without Pruneaux. Tarte aux Citron et aux Amandes, Tarte aux Poires à la Bourdalue, and Tarte aux Fraises, which is not "Tart with Freshes," as the name of the Tarte aux Fromage Frais ("Tart with Fresh Cheese," of course) might suggest, but rather Tart with Strawberries, which was a fine little French lesson. (Why are strawberries, in particular, named for freshness? Why not blackberries? Or say, river trout? I love playing amateur- not to say totally ignorant- etymologist....) I made two kinds of pastry in a kitchen so hot that, even with the aid of a food processor, the butter started melting before I could get it incorporated into the dough. Which work resulted in eight tart crusts, perhaps not paragons of the form, but good enough. I made eight fillings for my eight tart crusts. I creamed butter and broke eggs and beat batter until it formed "the ribbon." I poached pears and cherries and plums in red wine.

Its true. We did go in that room together and yes we were going to…you know… but Logan was so drunk. Like really drunk. He could barely see or walk or talk properly. But when he did all he kept talking about was you.” Rose said somberly. “Like what?” Sienna asked skeptically. “At first about how much he hated you, how he hated your dad, and your mom, then he started saying how he hated the fact that you could throw a football better than half the guys, how you pretend you don’t get dirty jokes when he knows you do, how you taste like strawberries and how he hates it when you smile ‘cos when you do, it lights up the sky.” She said sincerely.

One thing that has surprised Julie about going through the process of watching herself die is how vivid her world has become. Everything that she used to take for granted produces a sense of revelation, as if she were a child again. Tastes- the sweetness of a strawberry, it’s juice dripping onto her chin; a buttery pastry melting in her mouth. Smells - flowers on a front lawn, a colleague‘s perfume, seaweed washed up on the shore, Matt’s sweaty body in bed at night. Sounds – the strings on a cello, the screech of a car, her nephew’s laughter. Experiences - dancing at a birthday party, people-watching at Starbucks, buying a cute dress, opening the mail. All of this, no matter how mundane, delights her to no end. She’s become hyper-present. When people delude themselves into believing they have all the time in the world, she noticed, they get lazy. She hadn’t expected to experience this pleasure in her grief, to find it invigorating, in a way. But even as she’s dying, she’s realized, life goes on - even as the cancer invades her body, she still checks Twitter. At first she thought, why would I waste even ten minutes of the time I have left checking Twitter? And then she thought, why wouldn’t I? I like Twitter! She also tries not to dwell on what she’s losing. “I can breathe fine now, “Julie says, “but it’ll get harder, and I’ll grieve for that. Until then, I breathe.

Closing the distance between them, he had savored the modest allure of her walk and felt his body respond to the graceful sway of her hips as they approached the pool. He had envisioned her taking off her robe and showing him her slender nakedness, but instead, she had just stood there, as though searching for someone. It skipped through his mind that when he caught up to the girl, he would either apprehend or ravish her. He still wasn't sure which it would be as he stood before her, blocking her escape with a dark, slight smile. As she peered up at him fearfully from the shadowed folds of her hood, he found himself staring into the bluest eyes he had ever seen. He had only encountered that deep, dream-spun shade of cobalt once in his life before, in the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral. His awareness of the crowd them dimmed in the ocean-blue depths of her eyes. 'Who are you?' He did not say a word nor ask her permission. With the smooth self-assurance of a man who has access to every woman in the room, he captured her chin in a firm but gentle grip. She jumped when he touched her, panic flashing in her eyes. His hard stare softened slightly in amusement at that, but then his faint smile faded, for her skin was silken beneath his fingertips. With one hand, he lifted her face toward the dim torchlight, while the other softly brushed back her hood. Then Lucien faltered, faced with a beauty the likes of which he had never seen. His very soul grew hushed with reverence as he gazed at her, holding his breath for fear the vision would dissolve, a figment of his overactive brain. With her bright tresses gleaming the flame-gold of dawn and her large, frightened eyes of that shining, ethereal blue, he was so sure for a moment that she was a lost angel that he half expected to see silvery, feathered wings folded demurely beneath her coarse brown robe. She appeared somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two- a wholesome, nay, a virginal beauty of trembling purity. He instantly 'knew' that she was utterly untouched, impossible as that seemed in this place. Her face was proud and weary. Her satiny skin glowed in the candlelight, pale and fine, but her soft, luscious lips shot off an effervescent champagne-pop of desire that fizzed more sweetly in his veins than anything he'd felt since his adolescence, which had taken place, if he recalled correctly, some time during the Dark Ages. There was intelligence and valor in her delicate face, courage, and a quivering vulnerability that made him ache with anguish for the doom of all innocent things. 'A noble youth, a questing youth,' he thought, and if she had come to slay dragons, she had already pierced him in his black, fiery heart with the lance of her heaven-blue gaze.

And then I saw it. My father's wood: thick by then with twenty years' growth, but still not fully mature. A half-grown wood of oak trees around that little clearing, which, with my new perspective, I could see made the shape of a heart. I stared down at the clearing. The heart was unmistakable; tapered at the base with the strawberry field in the centre; a stand of trees to form the cleft. How long had it taken my father, I thought, to plan the formation, to plant out the trees? How many calculations had he made to create this God's-eye view? I thought of the years I had been at school; the years I had felt his absence. I remembered the contempt I'd felt at his little hobby. And finally I understood what he'd tried to say to me on the night of my wedding. 'Love is the thing that only God sees.' I'd wondered at the time what he meant. My father seldom spoke of love; rarely showed affection. Perhaps that was Tante Anna's influence, or maybe the few words he'd had were all spent on Naomi. But here it was at last, I saw: the heart-shaped meadow in the wood, a silent testament to grief; a last, enduring promise. Love is the thing that only God sees. I supposeyou'dsay that's because he sees into our hearts. Well, if he ever looks in mine, he'll see no more than I've told you. Confession may be good for the soul. But love is even better. Love redeems us even when we think ourselves irredeemable. I never really loved my wife- not in the way that she deserved. My children and I were never close. Perhaps that was my fault, after all. But Mimi- yes, I loved Mimi. And I loved Rosette Rocher, who was so very like her. One day I hope Rosette will see the heart-shaped meadow in the wood, and know that love surrounds her, whether see can see it or not. And you, Reynaud. I hope one day you can feel what only God sees, but which grows from the hearts of people like us: the flawed; the scarred; the broken. I hope you find it one day, Reynaud. Till then, look after Rosette for me. Make sure she knows my story. Tell her to take care of my wood. And keep picking the strawberries.

Heather whistles to round us all up. Oliver and I reach for each other’s hands at the same time, falling into step with each other as easily as breathing. “To the Milkshake Bar,” Heather calls. “Millie Mias on the house!” “That’s what I was hoping she’d say,” says Oliver. Perhaps the most delicious consequence of all this is that Heather coined a new sundae on the menu based on last summer’s shenanigans. It’s got a scoop of mint chip for me and Georgie, strawberry for Heather and Chloe, vanilla for my dad and Beth, Nutella for Farrah, sea salt chocolate chip cookie pieces for Oliver, and Reese’s Puffs for Teddy. The whole thing is a big ooey-gooey fantastic mess, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

From the passenger seat Kitty sighs heavily and rests her head against the window. “What’s up with you?” Peter asks. “The bridesmaids won’t let me go on the bachelorette night,” she says. “I’m the only one left out.” I narrow my eyes at the back of her head. “That’s bullshit!” Peter looks at me in the rearview mirror. “Why won’t you guys let her go?” “We’re going to a karaoke bar! We can’t bring Kitty in because she’s too young. Honestly, I think I was barely allowed to go.” “Why can’t you guys just go to a restaurant like we’re doing?” “Because that’s not a real bachelorette.” Peter rolls his eyes. “It’s not like you guys are going to a strip club or something--wait, did you change your mind? Are you going to a strip club?” “No!” “Then what’s the big deal? Just go somewhere else.” “Peter, it’s not my decision. You’ll have to take it up with Kristen.” I smack the back of Kitty’s arm. “Same goes for you, you little fiend! Quit trying to weasel your way in by manipulating Peter. He has no power here.” “Sorry, kid,” Peter says. Kitty slumps in her seat and then straightens. “What if I came to the bachelor night instead?” she suggests. “Since you’re just going to a restaurant?” Peter stutters, “Uh--uh, I don’t know, I’d have to talk to the guys…” “So you’ll ask? Because I like steak too. I like it so much. I’ll order steak with a baked potato on the side, and for dessert I’ll have a strawberry sundae with whipped cream.” Kitty beams a smile at Peter, who smiles back weakly. When we get to the elementary school and she hops out, perky and puffed up like a chickadee, I lean forward in my seat and say into Peter’s ear, “You just got played.

So…it wasn’t love at first sight then? With Dad? You fell in love later?” I don’t know why I feel disappointed. I don’t even believe in love at first sight. Except where it applies to my parents being perfect for each other. And anyways, isn’t that a kind of child-myth that all kids want to believe? “Sweetie…It was never love.” Screw disappointment. Now I feel gut-kicked. “What do you mean? But you had to…Then how did I…?” Mom sighs. “You were…the result of a moment of…weakness on my part.” But she takes too long to choose her words. I wonder what she thought of first, instead of “weakness.” Pity? Stupidity? She dabs her napkin at some imaginary syrup at the corner of her mouth. “The only weak moment we ever had, which is kind of extraordinary. Not that I regret it at all,” she says quickly. “I wouldn’t trade you for anything. You know that, right?” I wonder if “I wouldn’t trade you for anything” is also a child-myth. “So I was an accident. Not even the normal kind of accident. Like, a one-night stand, or a oops-I-didn’t-take-my-pill accident. I was an oops-I-accidentally-mated-with-my-first-experiment accident.” I put my head in my hands. “Lovely.” “That man loved you, Emma, from the moment you were born. He’d be very upset to hear you talking like that right now. Frankly, I am, too. I was not some experiment.” I bite my lip. “I know. It’s just…a lot, don’t you think?” “That’s why we’re going to have two pieces of strawberry pie, Agnes,” Mom says, her voice strained. I pull my stricken face from my hands and force it to smile. “Yes, please,” I say. I’m beginning to think Agnes isn’t a waitress for financial gain. I think she needs gossip to thrive. There’s no way a normal waitress would be or should be this attentive.

And then I saw it. My father's wood: thick by then with twenty years' growth, but still not fully mature. A half-grown wood of oak trees around that little clearing, which, with my new perspective, I could see made the shape of a heart. I stared down at the clearing. The heart was unmistakable; tapered at the base with the strawberry field in the centre; a stand of trees to form the cleft. How long had it taken my father, I thought, to plan the formation, to plant out the trees? How many calculations had he made to create this God's-eye view? I thought of the years I had been at school; the years I had felt his absence. I remembered the contempt I'd felt at his little hobby. And finally I understood what he'd tried to say to me on the night of my wedding. 'Love is the thing that only God sees.' I'd wondered at the time what he meant. My father seldom spoke of love; rarely showed affection. Perhaps that was Tante Anna's influence, or maybe the few words he'd had were all spent on Naomi. But here it was at last, I saw: the heart-shaped meadow in the wood, a silent testament to grief; a last, enduring promise. Love is the thing that only God sees. I suppose you'd say that's because he sees into our hearts. Well, if he ever looks in mine, he'll see no more than I've told you. Confession may be good for the soul. But love is even better. Love redeems us even when we think ourselves irredeemable. I never really loved my wife- not in the way that she deserved. My children and I were never close. Perhaps that was my fault, after all. But Mimi- yes, I loved Mimi. And I loved Rosette Rocher, who was so very like her. One day I hope Rosette will see the heart-shaped meadow in the wood, and know that love surrounds her, whether see can see it or not. And you, Reynaud. I hope one day you can feel what only God sees, but which grows from the hearts of people like us: the flawed; the scarred; the broken. I hope you find it one day, Reynaud. Till then, look after Rosette for me. Make sure she knows my story. Tell her to take care of my wood. And keep picking the strawberries.

Your mom probably wouldn't be too happy if you're dating someone who quit school." I laugh. "Nope, don't think so. But I do think she likes you." "Why do you say that?" he says, cocking his head at me. "When I called her, she told me to tell you good morning. And then she told me you were 'a keeper.'" She also said he was hot, which is a ten and a half on the creep-o-meter. "She won't think that when I start failing out of all my classes. I've missed too much school to give a convincing performance in that aspect." "Maybe you and I could do an exchange," I say, cringing at how many different ways that could sound. "You mean besides swapping spit?" I'm hyperaware of the tickle in my stomach, but I say, "Gross! Did Rachel teach you that?" He nods, still grinning. "I laughed for days." "Anyway, since you're helping me try to change, I could help you with your schoolwork. You know, tutor you. We're in all the same classes together, and I could really use the volunteer hours for my college application." His smile disappears as if I had slapped him. "Galen, is something wrong?" He unclenches his jaw. "No." "It was just a suggestion. I don't have to tutor you. I mean, we'll already be spending all day together in school and then practicing at night. You'll probably get sick of me." I toss in a soft laugh to keep it chit-chatty, but my innards feel as though they're cartwheeling. "Not likely." Our eyes lock. Searching his expression, my breath catches as the setting sun makes his hair shine almost purple. But it's the way each dying ray draws out silver flecks in his eyes that makes me look away-and accidentally glance at his mouth. He leans in. I raise my chin, meeting his gaze. The sunset probably deepens the heat on my cheeks to a strawberry red, but he might not notice since he can't seem to decide if he wants to look at my eyes or my mouth. I can smell the salt on his skin, feel the warmth of his breath. He's so close, the wind wafts the same strand of my hair onto both our cheeks. So when he eases away, it's me who feels slapped. He uproots the hand he buried in the sand beside me. "It's getting dark. I should take you home," he says. "We can do this again-I mean, we can practice again-tomorrow after school.

I visited a family… Both husband and wife had fought. They met at the front and got married there: “We celebrated our wedding in the trench. Before the battle. I made a white dress for myself out of a German parachute.” He had been a machine gunner, she a radio operator. The man immediately sent his wife to the kitchen: “Prepare something for us.” The kettle was already boiling, and the sandwiches were served, she sat down with us, but the husband immediately got her to her feet again: “Where are the strawberries? Where are our treats from the country?” After my repeated requests, he reluctantly relinquished his place, saying: “Tell it the way I taught you. Without tears and women’s triffles: how you wanted to be beautiful, how you wept when they cut off your braid.” Later she whispered to me: “He studied The History of the Great Patriotic War with me all last night. He was afraid for me. And now he’s worried I won’t remember right. Not the way I should.” That happened more than once, in more than one house. Yes, they cry a lot. They shout. Swallow heart pills after I am gone. Call an ambulance. But even so they beg me: “Come. Be sure to come. We’ve been silent so long. Forty years…

You are like me, you will die too, but not today: you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine: if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost radio, may never be an oil painting or Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are a concordance of person, number, voice, and place, strawberries spread through your name as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me of some spring, the waters as cool and clear (late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind), which is where you occur in grassy moonlight: and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving from its earthwards journeys, here where there is no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, when there was snow), you are my right, have come to be my night (your body takes on the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep becomes you): and you fall from the sky with several flowers, words spill from your mouth in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees and seas have flown away, I call it loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you, a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all, and free of any eden we can name.

His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was "like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it." There was, however, an analogy that might help. "I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania."...it had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory: Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens. In burying the kitten you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there's no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with five tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises to attend to first, you notice the farmer's little boy standing silently before you with that maddening smile, which is halfway a leer, on his face, and when you ask him what's up, he says triumphantly 'The bull's busted out and he's eating the strawberry bed'. Policy planning was like that. You might anticipate a problem three or four months into the future, but by the time you'd got your ideas down on paper, the months had shrunk to three to four weeks. Getting the paper approved took still more time, which left perhaps three or four days. And by the time others had translated those ideas into action, "the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn't foresee it a long time ago." Meanwhile, 234 other problems were following similar trajectories, causing throngs of people to stand around trying to get your attention: "Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again?

A display cake read JUNETEENTH! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery's owner wasn't. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song's words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone's backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer's sales pitch--so much hanging on that We all know--was targeted not to the people who'd celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who'd feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.

On Becoming a Poet in the 1950s" There was love and there was trees. Either you could stay inside and probe your emotions or you could go outside and keenly observe nature. Describe the sheen on carapaces, the effect of breeze on grass. What's the fag doing now? Dad would say. Picking the nose of his heart? Wanking off on a daffodil? He's not homosexual, Mom would retort, using her apron as a potholder to remove the apple brown betty from the oven. He's sensitive. He cares. He wishes to impart values and standards to an indifferent world. Wow! said Dad, stomping off to the pantry for another scotch. Two poets in the family. Ain't I a lucky duck? As fate would have it, I became one of your tweedy English teachers, what Dad would call a daffodil-wanker, and Mom ended up doing needlepoint, seventy-two kneelers for St. Fred's before she expired of the heart broken on the afternoon that Dad roared off with the Hell's Angels. We heard a little from Big Sur. A beard. Tattoos. A girlfriend named Strawberry. A boyfriend named Thor. Bars and pot and coffeehouses, stuff like that. After years of quotation by younger poets, admiration but no real notice, Dad is making the anthologies now. Critics cite his primal rage, the way he nails Winnetka.

You look pretty, Mommy.” “Thank you, sweetheart,” I say, gazing at her in the reflection of the mirror as she watches me, her expression curious. I pat the counter beside the sink, inviting her to join me, and she climbs up to sit on it as I grab a tube of lip-gloss, strawberry flavored. She puckers up, and I put some on her, smiling as I do it. “You know I love you, right, pretty girl? I love you more than everything. More than the trees and the birds and the sky. More than even pepperoni pizza and Harlequin novels.” “What’s a Harley-Quinn novel?” “Nothing you’ll need to know about for a long, long time,” I say, putting the lip-gloss away. “Just know that I don’t love them nearly as much as I love you.” She kicks her feet, grinning. “I love you, too.” “More than chocolate ice cream and Saturday mornings?” “Uh-huh,” she says. “More than colors and money!” “No way.” “And the Yoo-Hoo drinks and Happy Meal toys.” “Whoa.” “And even more than Breezeo!” Eyes wide, I look at her. That’s some serious commitment coming from my superhero-loving girl. “You know, you can love us the same.” “Nuh-uh,” she says, shaking her head. “You’re my mommy, so I love you more.” I press my pointer finger to the tip of her nose. “Well, I sure appreciate it, but remember that it’s okay if you ever do.

Then she remembered robin’s nests and rainbows and redbud trees and long drives big skies soft, worn blankets black-eyed Susans hammock naps treehouses red-eared sliders acorn wreaths fairy rings birthday crowns cupcake dinners honeysuckle lake water fried catfish summer storms moments of shared intuition the autumn tree line at dusk being enveloped by the warm C of a loving body being the enveloper being in the presence of Someone who believes you have something worthwhile to say being the one to whom important things are said and bird wrists and twig fingers and strawberry moons and finally: the symphony of hearts, the internal music that plays when one decides to renew their partnership with life. Yet the symphony had been playing faintly all along, a barely discernible underscore amid the noise of her going, going, long-term goaling, going, aiming, going, sweating, going, trying, going, failing, going, striving, doing, working, going, going, hiding, going, going, moving, going, going, excelling, perfecting, succeeding, winning, compartmentalizing, going, going, going, going, going. But now the call toward life was loud, swelling and triumphant— like a brass section with one hundred instruments, a musical theater ballad from a woman born to sing it, or a rock band full of young unknown geniuses. Suddenly, with such insatiable yearning, Wren wanted to fill her lungs. She did not choose to be born, but she chose, in this moment, to live.

I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough." "Waiting for the perfect love?" "No, even I know better than that. I'm looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you're doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don't want it anymore and throw it out the window. That's what I'm looking for." "I'm not sure that has anything to do with love," I said with amazement. "It does," she said. "You just don't know it. There are times in a girl's life when things like that are incredibly important." "Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?" "Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. 'Now I see, Midori. What a fool I've been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I'll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate mousse? Cheesecake?' " "So then what?" "So then I'd give him all the love he deserves for what he's done." "Sounds crazy to me." "Well, to me, that's what love is. Not that anyone can understand me though." Midori gave her head a little shake against my shoulder. "For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesn't begin at all.

My mother had a passion for all fruit except oranges, which she refused to allow in the house. She named each one of us, on a seeming whim, after a fruit and a recipe- Cassis, for her thick black-currant cake. Framboise, her raspberry liqueur, and Reinette after the reine-claude greengages that grew against the south wall of the house, thick as grapes, syrupy with wasps in midsummer. At one time we had over a hundred trees (apples, pears, plums, gages, cherries, quinces), not to mention the raspberry canes and the fields of strawberries, gooseberries, currants- the fruits of which were dried, stored, made into jams and liqueurs and wonderful cartwheel tarts on pâte brisée and crème pâtissière and almond paste. My memories are flavored with their scents, their colors, their names. My mother tended them as if they were her favorite children. Smudge pots against the frost, which we base every spring. And in summer, to keep the birds away, we would tie shapes cut out of silver paper onto the ends of the branches that would shiver and flick-flack in the wind, moose blowers of string drawn tightly across empty tin cans to make eerie bird-frightening sounds, windmills of colored paper that would spin wildly, so that the orchard was a carnival of baubles and shining ribbons and shrieking wires, like a Christmas party in midsummer. And the trees all had names. Belle Yvonne, my mother would say as she passed a gnarled pear tree. Rose d'Aquitane. Beurre du Roe Henry. Her voice at these times was soft, almost monotone. I could not tell whether she was speaking to me or to herself. Conference. Williams. Ghislane de Penthièvre. This sweetness.

When you measure a single spiked wave, such as that in Figure 8.9, the device registers the spike's location. If it's spiked at Strawberry Fields, that's what the device reads; if you look at the result, your brain registers that location and you become aware of it. If it's spiked at Grant's Tomb, that's what the device registers; if you look, your brain registers that location and you become aware of it. When you measure the double spiked wave in Figure 8.10, Schrodinger's math tells you to combine the two results you just found. But, says Everett, be careful and precise when you combine them. The combined result, he argued, does not yield a meter and a mind each simultaneously registering two locations. That's sloppy thinking. Instead, proceeding slowly and literally, we find that the combined result is a device and a mind registering Strawberry Fields, and a device and a mind registering Grant's Tomb. And what does that mean? I'll use broad strokes in painting the general picture, which I'll refine shortly. To accommodate Everett's suggested outcome, the device and you and everything else must split upon measurement, yielding two devices, two yous, and two everything elses-the only difference between the two being that one device and one you registers Strawberry Fields, while the other device and the other you registers Grant's Tomb. As in Figure 8.12, this implies that we now have two parallel realities, two parallel worlds. To the you occupying each, the measurement and your mental impression of the result are sharp and unique and thus fell like life as usual. The peculiarity, of course, is that there are two of you who feel this way.

He served Adaira the first slice and grinned when she cast a wary look his way. “You made this?” “Aye,” he said, standing close to her, waiting. Adaira took her spoon and poked at the pie. “What’s in it, Jack?” “Oh, what all did we dump in there, Frae? Blackberries, strawberries, pimpleberries—” “Pimpleberries?” Frae gasped in alarm. “What’s a pim—” “Honey and butter and a dash of good luck,” he finished, his gaze remaining on Adaira. “All of your favorite things, as I recall, heiress.” Adaira stared at him, her face composed save for her pursed lips. She was trying not to laugh, he realized. He was suddenly flustered. “Heiress, I did not put pimpleberries in there,” Frae frantically said. “Oh, sweet lass, I know you didn’t,” Adaira said, turning a smile upon the girl. “Your brother is teasing me. You see, when we were your age, there was a great dinner in the hall one night. And Jack brought me a piece of pie, to say sorry for something he had done earlier that day. He looked so contrite that I foolishly believed him and took a bite, only to realize something was very strange about it.” “What was it?” Frae asked, as if she could not imagine Jack doing something so awful. “He called it a ‘pimpleberry’, but it was actually a small skin of ink,” Adaira replied. “And it stained my teeth for a week and made me very ill.” “Is this true, Jack?” Mirin cried, setting her teacup down with a clatter. “‘Tis truth,” he confessed, and before any of the women could say another word, he took the plate and the spoon from Adaira and ate a piece of the pie. It was delicious, but only because he and Frae had found and harvested the berries and rolled out the dough and talked about swords and books and baby cows while they made it. He swallowed the sweetness and said, “I believe this one is exceptional, thanks to Frae.” Mirin bustled into the kitchen to cut a new slice for Adaira and find her a clean utensil, muttering about how the mainland must have robbed Jack of all manners. But Adaira didn’t seem to hear. She took the plate from his hands, as well as the spoon, and ate after him.

She is pissed off all the time,” he mumbled and I remained silent, letting him ramble. “She wants chocolate ice cream, I go in search of chocolate, but the time I get back she’s pissed because she wants strawberry instead. I can’t win.” He looked me straight in the eyes and I swear his expression was one of desperation. “It wasn’t like this before. With Liam she was so sweet. But I swear the damn devil has possessed my wife and she might kill me in my sleep one night.” It was then I laughed. “What the hell is so funny?” he asked. “I sleep with one eye open and one leg hanging off the bed touching the floor at my side. This way if I have to move fast I feel I’m one step closer.” He didn’t smile. There was absolutely no humor in his words. “Weren’t you the one that said you wanted five kids?” I asked. “I changed my mind. After this one, we’re done. I want Trinity back.” Again, complete seriousness. Poor guy looked lost. And it was the best damn thing to witness. Within four months of having Liam, Trinity was pregnant again. And this time she was cranky as hell. Everyone noticed it, but she directed all that aggravation toward the man she said was to blame. And the rest of us loved to witness his hell. “Go home, Chase,” I told him and he looked as if he wanted to argue. “Stop at the store and pick up every flavor of ice cream they got,” I told him. “Tell her she’s beautiful and rub her feet.” “I do that already,” he whined. “I tell her she’s beautiful, and no other woman has ever looked as amazing as her. I tell her I love her and that she is my world, but she is like the exorcist.” “Well it’s your job to take it. Let her growl and complain and just take it,” I told him. “Because at the end of the day you just need to remember one thing.” He looked at me like I was about to give him the best piece of advice. I almost felt bad about the fact that I had nothing reassuring to say. “What?” he asked and I cracked a smile, almost talking myself out of taking the chance at being an asshole. Then I thought about the fact that had the roles been reversed he would have jumped at the chance. “You are to blame for the state she is in.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “And the rest of us guys are loving that it’s you and not us being tortured.” “You’re an asshole,” he mumbled as he turned around and walked off toward his truck. I laughed the entire drive home.

Now imagine that an anthropologist specializing in primitive cultures beams herself down to the natives in Silicon Valley, whose way of life has not advanced a kilobyte beyond the Google age and whose tools have remained just as primitive as they were in the twenty-first century. She brings along with her a tray of taste samples called the Munsell Taste System. On it are representative samples of the whole taste space, 1,024 little fruit cubes that automatically reconstitute themselves on the tray the moment one picks them up. She asks the natives to try each of these and tell her the name of the taste in their language, and she is astonished at the abject poverty of their fructiferous vocabulary. She cannot comprehend why they are struggling to describe the taste samples, why their only abstract taste concepts are limited to the crudest oppositions such as “sweet” and “sour,” and why the only other descriptions they manage to come up with are “it’s a bit like an X,” where X is the name of a certain legacy fruit. She begins to suspect that their taste buds have not yet fully evolved. But when she tests the natives, she establishes that they are fully capable of telling the difference between any two cubes in her sample. There is obviously nothing wrong with their tongue, but why then is their langue so defective? Let’s try to help her. Suppose you are one of those natives and she has just given you a cube that tastes like nothing you’ve ever tried before. Still, it vaguely reminds you of something. For a while you struggle to remember, then it dawns on you that this taste is slightly similar to those wild strawberries you had in a Parisian restaurant once, only this taste seems ten times more pronounced and is blended with a few other things that you can’t identify. So finally you say, very hesitantly, that “it’s a bit like wild strawberries.” Since you look like a particularly intelligent and articulate native, the anthropologist cannot resist posing a meta-question: doesn’t it feel odd and limiting, she asks, not to have precise vocabulary to describe tastes in the region of wild strawberries? You tell her that the only things “in the region of wild strawberry” that you’ve ever tasted before were wild strawberries, and that it has never crossed your mind that the taste of wild strawberries should need any more general or abstract description than “the taste of wild strawberries.” She smiles with baffled incomprehension.

Closing the distance between them, he had saved the modest allure of her walk and felt his body respond to the graceful sway of her hips as they approached the pool. He had envisioned her taking off her robe and showing him her slender nakedness, but instead, she had just stood there, as though searching for someone. It skipped through his mind that when he caught up to the girl, he would either apprehend or ravish her. He still wasn't sure which it would be as he stood before her, blocking her escape with a dark, slight smile. As she peered up at him fearfully from the shadowed folds of her hood, he found himself staring into the bluest eyes he had ever seen. He had only encountered that deep, dream-spun shade of cobalt once in his life before, in the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral. His awareness of the crowd them dimmed in the ocean-blue depths of her eyes. 'Who are you?' He did not say a word nor ask her permission. With the smooth self-assurance of a man who has access to every woman in the room, he captured her chin in a firm but gentle grip. She jumped when he touched her, panic flashing in her eyes. His hard stare softened slightly in amusement at that, but then his faint smile faded, for her skin was silken beneath his fingertips. With one hand, he lifted her face toward the dim torchlight, while the other softly brushed back her hood. Then Lucien faltered, faced with a beauty the likes of which he had never seen. His very soul grew hushed with reverence as he gazed at her, holding his breath for fear the vision would dissolve, a figment of his overactive brain. With her bright tresses gleaming the flame-gold of dawn and her large, frightened eyes of that shining, ethereal blue, he was so sure for a moment that she was a lost angel that he half expected to see silvery, feathered wings folded demurely beneath her coarse brown robe. She appeared somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two- a wholesome, nay, a virginal beauty of trembling purity. He instantly 'knew' that she was utterly untouched, impossible as that seemed in this place. Her face was proud and weary. Her satiny skin glowed in the candlelight, pale and fine, but her soft, luscious lips shot off an effervescent champagne-pop of desire that fizzed more sweetly in his veins than anything he'd felt since his adolescence, which had taken place, if he recalled correctly, some time during the Dark Ages. There was intelligence and valor in her delicate face, courage, and a quivering vulnerability that made him ache with anguish for the doom of all innocent things. 'A noble youth, a questing youth,' he thought, and if she had come to slay dragons, she had already pierced him in his black, fiery heart with the lance of her heaven-blue gaze.

Kevin Swift woke up to a series of unusual sounds. The first, not to mention easiest, for him to identify was crying—no, not just crying. Sobbing. It was the sound of someone sobbing manly tears, though they did not sound sad. The second sound was, strangely enough, a word: kawaii. Just what the heck someone was doing speaking Japanese was beyond him. It was the third sound, however, that caused him to open his eyes—namely because it was right next to his ear. “Nya.” Cracking a single eye open, Kevin first saw nothing but red. It was hair. Lilian’s hair. A million strands of silk that tickled his nose. The familiar scent of strawberries and vanilla lulled his mind into a sense of contentment. He must have buried his face in her hair sometime during the night. “Nya.” Something swatted at his ear, sharp and hard. It kind of hurt. Unburying his face and turning his head, Kevin met the large yellow orbs of a black cat. “Nya.” “Morning.” He yawned. “Nya.” “Did you sleep well?” “Nya.” “Good to know.” “Nya.” “… You don’t really say anything other than ‘nya’ do you? Shouldn’t you be ‘meowing’ instead? You know, like a cat should?” The cat tilted her head. “Nya?” “… Never mind.

He says I should stay in the kitchen and work on my recipes.

She pushed past me and stormed toward the strawberry fields. She hit the tetherball as she passed and sent it spinning angrily around the pole. I’d like to say my day got better from there.

send our joyful greetings and thanks. Now our minds are one. The oratory is more than an economic model; it’s a civics lesson, too. Freida emphasizes that hearing the Thanksgiving Address every day lifts up models of leadership for the young people: the strawberry as leader of the berries, the eagle as leader of the birds. “It reminds them that much is expected of them eventually. It says this is what it means to be a good leader, to have vision, and to be generous, to sacrifice on behalf of the people. Like the maple, leaders are the first to offer their gifts.” It reminds the whole community that leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom.

But we’re in costume!” Biana argued. “Yeah, but you guys will still stand out. I mean… look at you. You look like models.” “Wait, is Foster saying she thinks we’re hot?” Keefe asked. “I think she is.” And the huge grin dimpling Dex’s cheeks was practically beaming. Sophie wanted to deny it, but the truth was, elves were way prettier than humans. Even Dex with his messy strawberry blond hair was ten times cuter than any human boy his age.

There was a bustle of people in the street as I made my way to La Bonbonnière, which is, quite simply, the most beautiful candy store in the world. The best thing about La Bonbonnière is that it's all windows. Before I even walk through the door I am greeted by a fuzzy three-foot-high statue of a polar bear trying to dip his paws into a copper cauldron filled with marrons glacés--- whole candied chestnuts. Each one was meticulously wrapped in gold foil, a miniature gift in and of itself. If nothing else, Christmas in Provence reminds you of a time when sugar was a luxury as fine and rare as silk. Back to my assignment: I needed two kinds of nougat: white soft nougat made with honey, almonds, and fluffy egg whites (the angel's part) and hard dark nougat--- more like honey almond brittle--- for the devil. Where are the calissons d'Aix? There they are, hiding behind the cash register, small ovals of almond paste covered with fondant icing. Traditional calissons are flavored with essence of bitter almond, but I couldn't resist some of the more exotic variations: rose, lemon verbena, and génépi, an astringent mountain herb. Though I love the tender chew of nougat and the pliant sweetness of marzipan, my favorite of the Provençal Christmas treats is the mendiant--- a small disk of dark or milk chocolate topped with dried fruit and nuts representing four religious orders: raisins for the Dominicans, hazelnuts for the Augustinians, dried figs for the Franciscans, and almonds for the Carmelites. When Alexandre is a bit older, I think we'll make these together. They seem like an ideal family project--- essentially puddles of melted chocolate with fruit and nut toppings. See, as soon as you say "puddles of melted chocolate," everyone's on board. Though fruits confits--- candied fruit--- are not, strictly speaking, part of les trieze desserts, I can't resist. I think of them as the crown jewels of French confiserie, and Apt is the world capital of production. Dipped in sugar syrup, the fruits become almost translucent; whole pears, apricots, and strawberries glow from within like the gems in a pirate's treasure chest. Slices of kiwi, melon, and angelica catch the light like the panes of a stained-glass window. All the dazzling tastes of a Provençal summer, frozen in time.

They do like to hoard all their wealth, don’t they,” Lehabah said, eyeing Bryce. “Just like you, BB. Only spending on yourself, and never anything nice for me.” Bryce removed her foot. “Do I not buy you strawberry shisha every other week?” Lehabah crossed her arms. “That’s barely a gift.” “Says the sprite who hotboxes herself in that little glass dome and burns it all night and tells me not to bother her until she’s done.” She leaned back in her chair, smug as a cat, and Hunt nearly grinned again at the spark in her eyes. Bryce grabbed his phone from the table and snapped a photo of him before he could object. Then one of Lehabah. And another of Syrinx.

There's one last drink remaining, a tall and narrow glass full of bubbly golden liquid. There are sliced strawberries submerged beneath a topping of vanilla ice cream. Alexander hands it to her. "What is it?" she asks. "A strawberry prosecco float. Who says vanilla ice cream can't be fancy?

I immediately understand they are the mushrooms from Alice in Wonderland. I look around and see some of the bakery’s petit fours on a separate table with the words Eat Me. Next to it is a fountain with strawberry and mandarin-infused water. It says Drink Me.

I pronounce you man and wife,” the priest says. That’s it. We’re married. Aida tilts her lips up for a chaste kiss. To show her who’s boss, I seize her by the shoulders and kiss her roughly, forcing my tongue into her mouth. Her lips and tongue taste sweet. Tart and fresh. Like something I haven’t tasted in a very long time . . . Strawberries. I can already feel my tongue going numb. My throat starts to swell, my breath coming out in a whistle. The church whirls around me in a kaleidoscope of color, as I slump to the floor. That fucking BITCH!

Lilly Samson, The Switch, Quotes, shameless manipulation of. Allergies disclaimer: I would like to stress that this book is not exactly for the unwashed masses: I delayed showering after the last switch. I've created a Pavlovian response: he must associate its floral sweetness with sexual fulfilment. Adam has a "Pavlovian" reaction to Elena's BO? Bribes her with cake to lessen the wrath when asking Elena to wash? He frowns, seeing that I'm silent and trembling. 'My perfume was weak; hers much stronger.' I say, my temper flaring. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the usual wasteman chatting up yours truly in Sarf London would probably assume that a big phat slice of Marks & Spencer's Strawberry Pavlova will get him into the lady's knickers. Nope, she's allergic to stupid. A merengue dessert will hardly cause a rash, but a moron makes her skin crawl. This is a cleverly written book. So some of you, keen aspiring readers, please have your Oxford fictionary handy. Just saying! In the words of our hero: Bloody pricey...But God, it is a nice smell. Don't you like it? And then he "squirts onto her wrist, playfully.

So, Mike tells me you're my go-to," he said, "and I've gotta say, I'm surprised." His blue eyes gleamed, his thinning strawberry blond hair was cut short, and freckles covered his pale face. In his hands he held a mini Jets football. "I didn't think Sister Jamie could hang with the big boys". "I can hang with anyone," I smiled, even though I wanted to punch him in the face.

So, Mike tells me you're my go-to," he said, "and I've gotta say, I'm surprised." His blue eyes gleamed, his thinning strawberry blond hair was cut short, and freckles covered his pale face. In his hands he held a mini Jets football. "I didn't think Sister Jamie could hang with the big boys". "I can hang with anyone," I smiled, even though I wanted to punch him in the face.

strawberry sunrise Though its name is somewhat evocative of a sweet elderly couple holding hands as they watch the sunrise, this drink is rather bold in its combination of prosecco, white wine, and tequila. In other words, this beautiful farm-to-table beverage has a bit of a sneaky bite. It’s best enjoyed, I’d say, with a lover, though it goes down just as easily with friends over brunch, during an at-home happy hour, or when alone on a Saturday afternoon with your cat/dog/pig/opossum. TIME: 5 MINUTES SERVES: 1 2 strawberries Ground pink peppercorns 1 ounce tequila 2 ounces sauvignon blanc 1 ounce Strawberry Syrup 1½ ounces Strawberry Mint Lemonade 1 ounce prosecco Splash of fresh orange juice Cut the stem out of each strawberry with a “V” cut, then slice each strawberry from top to bottom into ¼-inch-thick slices so that each slice resembles a heart. Take the prettiest slice and cut a small notch in its narrow end. Spread the pink peppercorns on a small plate. Dip one edge of the strawberry slice in the pink pepper until the edge is coated. Set aside, reserving the pink pepper. Fill a wineglass with ice and add the remaining strawberry slices. Add the tequila, sauvignon blanc, strawberry syrup, lemonade, prosecco, and orange juice to the glass. Sprinkle a pinch of pink pepper on top of the drink. Stir with a barspoon. Secure the notched strawberry garnish to the rim of the glass. Serve and enjoy.

In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods---strawberries, pecans, blueberries, and some squashes---that had the durability to survive millennia. Mexico and South America had a respectable collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, and peanuts. But the list is quaint when compared to what the other side of the world was up to. Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands more that endure today. If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second. Edible plants tend to reproduce sexually. A seed produces a plant. The plant produces flowers. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from other plants. This is nature beautifully at work. But it was inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific food they liked. The stroke of genius from early farmers was to realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. Take a small cutting from a mature apple tree, graft it onto mature rootstock, and it'll produce perfectly identical apples. Millenia before humans learned how to clone a sheep, they discovered how to clone plants, and every Granny Smith apple, Bartlett pear, and Cavendish banana you've ever eaten leaves you further indebted to the people who figured that out. Still, even on the same planet, there were two worlds for almost all of human time. People are believed to have dug the first roots of agriculture in the Middle East, in the so-called Fertile Crescent, which had all the qualities of a farmer's dream: warm climate; rich, airy soil; and two flowing rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Around ten thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, humans taught themselves how to grow grains like barley and wheat, and soon after, dates, figs, and pomegranates.

The Mexican War did two good things though. We got a lot of western land, damn near doubled our size, and besides that it was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murder settled on us the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible. And then the arguments: Can you keep a slave? Well if you bought him in good faith, why not? Next they’ll be saying a man can’t have a horse. Who is it wants to take my property? And there we were, like a man scratching at his own face and bleeding into his own beard. Well, that was over and we got slowly up off the bloody ground and started westward. There came boom and bust, bankruptcy, depression. Great public thieves came along and picked the pockets of everyone who had a pocket. To hell with that rotten century! Let’s get it over and the door closed shut on it! Let’s close it like a book and go on reading! New chapter, new life. A man will have clean hands once we get the lid slammed shut on that stinking century. It’s a fair thing ahead. There’s no rot on this clean new hundred years. It’s not stacked, and any bastard who deals seconds from this new deck of years—why, we’ll crucify him head down over a privy. Oh, but strawberries will never taste so good again and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!

Waiting for the perfect love?” “No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.” “I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement. “It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are time in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.” “Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?” “Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?” “So then what?” “So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.” “Sounds crazy to me.” “Well, to me, that’s what love is…

Now this is interesting.” He addressed a luscious strawberry, red-ripe all over, the exact shape and size a strawberry ought to be, but when had his chair shifted so close? “I am trying to do the pretty without being caught in parson’s mousetrap, I suffer a small lapse of propriety while under the influence with a lady whom all esteem, and you think it’s your name I’m protecting?” He popped the strawberry into his mouth and considered her in a lazy-lidded way that had Eve’s insides pitching in odd directions. “Why are you bristling, Deene? I’m offering my thanks.” He finished chewing the strawberry, though his blue eyes had bored into hers as he’d consumed it. “Did you enjoy our kiss, Evie?” Evie. Only her family called her that—and him. He said it with a particular intimate inflection her family never used though. She sat up very straight. “Your question has no proper answer. If I say no, then I am dishonest—I flew at you, after all, and you had to peel me off of you—and if I say yes, then I am wicked.” “Because if you did enjoy that kiss,” he went on as if she hadn’t spoken, “for I certainly enjoyed it, then perhaps you might be thanking me for the kiss and not for keeping the silence any man with sense or manners would have kept.” With him staring at her like that, it was hard to grasp the sense of his words, but Eve made the effort. He was offended that she’d thanked him. Any man admitted under her parents’ roof would have been discreet about such a moment. He had enjoyed that kiss. He leaned forward, so close Eve could catch the scent of his lavender-and-cedar soap, so close she could… Feel his lips, soft and knowing, against her cheek. Oh, she should turn away. There was no convenient tankard of spiked punch to blame, no holiday cheer, no reckless sense of yet another sibling slipping away into marriage. His hand came up to cradle her jaw, then to shift her head slightly so she faced him. Those soft, knowing lips teased their way to her mouth, gently, inexorably.

Lady Emily’s maid had come to her many years ago as Amélie Conque, but the assimilative genius of the English language, Mr Leslie’s determination not to truckle to foreigners in the matter of pronunciation, and Mr Gudgeon’s deep-rooted conviction of the purity of his own French accent had all united to form the name Conk. By this name she had been known with terror and dislike by Lady Emily’s children, with love and disrespect by her grandchildren. Whether Conk had softened with years or the new generation were more confident than the old, we cannot say. Probably both. Conk

When someone’s look says it all, stop listening.

Even when they were very small Eliza had known that Sammy needed her more than she needed him, even before he caught the fever and was nearly lost to them. Something in his manner left him vulnerable. Other children had known it when they were small, grown-ups knew it now. They sensed somehow that he was not really one of them. And he wasn't, he was a changeling. Eliza knew all about changelings. She'd read about them in the book of fairy tales that had sat for a time in the rag and bottle shop. There'd been pictures, too. Fairies and sprites who looked just like Sammy, with his fine strawberry hair, long ribbony limbs and round blue eyes. The way Mother told it, something had set Sammy apart from other children ever since he was a babe: an innocence, a stillness. She used to say that while Eliza had screwed up her little red face and howled for a feeding, Sammy had never cried. He used to lie in his drawer, listening, as if to beautiful music floating on the breeze that no one but he could hear.

It’d be nice to hang out with a group of girls.” “Should I feel insulted?” Her gaze dropped to his watered-down strawberry daiquiri. “I’d say you’re filling in quite nicely for the time being.” Touché. “I thought we agreed that my daiquiri doesn’t make me any less manly.” “I think you agreed to that,

I pick up “This is Your Policeman” Public Information Bulletin No. 5. Under “His Code of Ethics” it says, “I will enforce the law … never employing unnecessary force or violence and never accepting gratuities.” I guess the cops at the Tuesday bust must have had this in mind, because I didn’t see any of them taking tips.

We youths say "like" all the time because we mistrust reality. It takes a certain commitment to say something is. Inserting "like" gives you a bit more running room.

Leah pulled a couple of tube from the refrigerator and asked him : "you want strawberries and whipped cream on your cake?" He wanted whipped cream on the nipples hidden beneath her sweatshirt, but he wasn't stupid enough to say so.

ANNALS OF LANGUAGE WORD MAGIC How much really gets lost in translation? BY ADAM GOPNIK Once, in a restaurant in Italy with my family, I occasioned enormous merriment, as a nineteenth-century humorist would have put it, by confusing two Italian words. I thought I had, very suavely, ordered for dessert fragoline—those lovely little wild strawberries. Instead, I seem to have asked for fagiolini—green beans. The waiter ceremoniously brought me a plate of green beans with my coffee, along with the flan and the gelato for the kids. The significant insight the mistake provided—arriving mere microseconds after the laughter of those kids, who for some reason still bring up the occasion, often—was about the arbitrary nature of language: the single “r” rolled right makes one a master of the trattoria, an “r” unrolled the family fool. Although speaking feels as natural as breathing, the truth is that the words we use are strange, abstract symbols, at least as remote from their objects as Egyptian hieroglyphs are from theirs, and as quietly treacherous as Egyptian tombs. Although berries and beans may be separated by a subtle sound within a language, the larger space between like words in different languages is just as hazardous. Two words that seem to indicate the same state may mean the opposite. In English, the spiritual guy is pious, while the one called spirituel in French is witty; a liberal in France is on the right, in America to the left. And what of cultural inflections that seem to separate meanings otherwise identical? When we have savoir-faire in French, don’t we actually have something different from “know-how” in English, even though the two compounds combine pretty much the same elements? These questions, about the hidden traps of words and phrases, are the subject of what may be the weirdest book the twenty-first century has so far produced: “Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon,” a thirteen-hundred-page volume, originally edited in French by the French philologist Barbara Cassin but now published, by Princeton University Press, in a much altered English edition, overseen by the comp-lit luminaries Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. How weird is it? Let us count the ways. It is in part an anti-English protest, taking arms against the imperializing spread of our era’s, well, lingua franca—which has now been offered in English, so that everyone can understand it. The book’s presupposition is that there are significant, namable, untranslatable differences between tongues, so that, say, “history” in English, histoire in French, and Geschichte in German have very different boundaries that we need to grasp if we are to understand the texts in which the words occur. The editors, propelled by this belief, also believe it to be wrong. In each entry of the Dictionary, the differences are tracked, explained, and made perfectly clear in English, which rather undermines the premise that these terms are untranslatable, except in the dim sense that it sometimes takes a few words in one language to indicate a concept that is more succinctly embodied in one word in another. Histoire in French means both “history” and “story,” in a way that “history” in English doesn’t quite, so that the relation between history and story may be more elegantly available in French. But no one has trouble in English with the notion that histories are narratives we make up as much as chronicles we discern. Indeed, in the preface, the editors cheerfully announce that any strong form of the belief to which their book may seem to be a monument is certainly false: “Some pretty good equivalencies are always available. . . . If there were a perfect equivalence from language to language, the result would not be translation; it would be a replica. . . . The constant recourse to the metaphor of loss in translation is finally too easy.” So their Dictionary is a self-exploding book,

Words are powerful, so add visually descriptive adjectives to the story. For example, if you're talking about a fruit you had for lunch, you could say, "Today I had the most delicious strawberries. As I bit into one, I could feel the juices squirting out," or

All that matters, in the end, is the little things. The way Mim says my name to wake me up in the morning. The way Bee's hand feels in mine. The way the sun cast my shadow across the yard yesterday. The way your cheeks flush when we kiss. The smell of hay and the taste of strawberries and the feel of fresh black dirt between my toes. This is what matters, Midnight.

A man goes to the doctor’s and says: “Doctor, doctor, I’ve got a strawberry stuck up my arse!” The doctor says: “I’ve got some cream for that.

He did not know what he would do or say to Mrs. Das once they arrived at the hills. Perhaps he would tell her what a pleasing smile she had. Perhaps he would compliment her strawberry shirt, which he found irresistibly becoming. Perhaps, when Mr. Das was busy taking a picture, he would take her hand.

You look hot,” he blurted. Shit. Why had he said that? Meg turned red as a strawberry, pulled her robe tighter around her neck, and tugged the belt tight. “Warm,” he rushed to say. “You know, flushed—like, from your bath.” For someone who was usually Mr. Rico Suave, he was really bumbling everything. He swept his gaze up and down her magnificent body. “I’m just sad your ass is covered.” Fuck, what was he doing? He tripped over his words to cover. “I mean, glad. Really glad. After the rip and everything.” Sweat rolled down his back. Maybe he needed to take his own temp. Because he really wasn’t acting like himself.

Can the trees and flowers which we see all around us at all times have themselves formed such perfect systems as to bring about a phenomenon such as photosynthesis, some parts of which are still not fully understood, in their own bodies? Did plants choose to use carbon dioxide (CO2), of the gases in the air, to produce food? Did they themselves determine the amount of CO2 they would use? Could plants have designed those mechanisms which make up the root system and which enable them to take the materials necessary for photosynthesis from the soil? Did plants bring about a transport system where different types of tubes are used for transporting nutrients and water? As ever, defenders of the theory of evolution searching for an answer 16 The solar energy trapped by the chlorophyll in the leaf, carbon-dioxide in the air, and water in the plant go through various processes and are used to produce glucose and oxygen. These complex processes do not take place in a factory, but in special structures like those in the leaf in the picture, and which measure only one thousandth of a millimeter across. Sunlight Chlorophyll Glucose 6H2O Water Light Chlorophyll Carbon dioxide + Water Glucose + Oxygen 6CO2 Carbon dioxide 6O2 Oxygen C6 H12O 6 to the question of how plants emerged have resorted to "chance" as their only re m e d y. They have claimed that from one species of plant which came about by chance, an infinite variety of plants have emerged, again by chance, and that features such as smell, taste, and colour, particular to each species, again came about by chance. But they have been unable to give any scientific proof of these claims. Evolutionists explain moss turning into a strawberry plant, or a poplar, or a rose bush, by saying that conditions brought about by chance differentiated them. Whereas when just one plant cell is observed, a system so complex will be seen as could not have come about by minute changes over time. This complex system and other mechanisms in plants definitively disprove the coincidence scenarios put forward as evolutionist logic. In this situation just one result emerges.

Is there a problem, ma’am?” Mitch slanted a glance in her direction. She stood military straight, vehemently shaking her head. “Everything’s fine, Officer.” “Sheriff. You sure about that?” Charlie said, sounding like a complete hard-ass. “Looked to me like you were being accosted.” “N-no—” Mitch cut her off. “Would you get the hell out of here?” “Mitch,” Maddie said, with a low hiss. Evidently in a devious mood, Charlie stalked forward, placing a hand menacingly over his baton. “What did you say?” “Fuck. Off.” Mitch fired each word like a bullet. “Mitch, please,” Maddie said, tone pleading. “Do I have to take you in?” Charlie’s attention shifted in Maddie’s direction and his mouth twisted into a smile that Mitch had seen him use on hundreds of women during their fifteen-year friendship. “I’ll be happy to look after her for you, Mitch.” A stab of something suspiciously close to possessiveness jabbed at his rib cage. Mitch shot Charlie a droll glare. “Over my dead body.” One black brow rose over his sunglasses. “That can be arranged.” “Please, don’t take him to jail,” Maddie said, sounding alarmed. Both Charlie’s and Mitch’s attention snapped to her. “Now, why would you be thinking that?” Charlie asked, in an amused voice. Maddie’s gaze darted back and forth. “He threatened you.” Mitch laughed and Charlie scoffed. “Honey, he’s nothing but a pesky little fly I’d have to bat away.” Comprehension dawned and her worried expression cleared. “Oh, I see. You know, you should tell someone this is some macho-guy act before you get rolling.” “And what fun would that be?” Charlie rocked back on his heels. Even with his eyes hidden behind the mirrored frames, it was damn clear he was scoping Maddie out from head to toe. Under his scrutiny, she started to fidget. She pressed closer to Mitch, almost as if by instinct, pleasing him immensely. “Don’t mind him, Princess.” He slid his arm around her waist, pulling her tighter against him. “He likes to abuse his power over unsuspecting women.” “Um,” Maddie said, fitting under the crook his arm as though she were made for him, which was odd considering he towered over her by a foot. “I bet it’s quite effective.” Charlie laughed. “Maddie Donovan, you’re everything I’ve heard and then some.” Maddie stiffened, pulling out of Mitch’s embrace and cocking her head to the side. “How do you know my name?” “Honey,” Charlie drawled, the endearment scraping a dull blade over Mitch’s nerves. “This is a small town. People don’t have anything else to do but talk. Give me time and I’ll know your whole life story.” That strawberry-stained mouth pulled into a frown, and two little lines formed between auburn brows. She studied the cracked concrete at her feet. Suddenly, she looked up, her cheeks flushing when she realized they were watching her. She smiled brightly. “Oh well, I guess this is what I get for making an entrance.” Charlie

He shot off the bed and gripped her arms far too tightly. She winced, but her expression remained defiant. “You need to run, little girl.” If she’d had any common sense, she’d back down, but instead she scoffed. “I think you’re all talk and no follow-through.” He brought her close, so they were nose-to-nose. “I’m going to give you to the count of five to get the hell out of here.” His voice dropped with menace that most people would have the wisdom to retreat from, but her strawberry-stained lips curved into a smile. “One, two, three, four, five.” The words tumbled out of her mouth as though she couldn’t say them fast enough. Ripe satisfaction flashed in her eyes. Shocked, he blinked. Everything froze for a fraction of a second as all reason fled and his body took over. His mouth slammed over hers with a hard, brutal demand that had her squirming in his arms. Heedless of her struggle, he hauled her closer, his tongue invading her mouth. He didn’t ask permission. Didn’t tempt or coax. He took. Demanded. Gave her exactly what she’d been baiting him for and then some.

Having got rid of Jefferson—at least in name—Turing next addresses a whole class of objections that he calls “Arguments from Various Disabilities,” and which he defines as taking the form “I grant you that you can make machines do all the things you have mentioned but you will never be able to make one to do X.” He then offers a rather tongue-in-cheek “selection”: Be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly; have initiative, have a sense of humour, tell right from wrong, make mistakes; fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream; make some one fall in love with it, learn from experience; use words properly, be the subject of its own thought; have as much diversity of behaviour as a man, do something really new. As Turing notes, “no support is usually offered for these statements,” most of which are founded on the principle of scientific induction. . . . The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction. A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained. Otherwise we may (as most English children do) decide that everybody speaks English, and that it is silly to learn French. Turing’s repudiation of scientific induction, however, is more than just a dig at the insularity and closed-mindedness of England. His purpose is actually much larger: to call attention to the infinite regress into which we are likely to fall if we attempt to use disabilities (such as, say, the inability, on the part of a man, to feel attraction to a woman) as determining factors in defining intelligence. Nor is the question of homosexuality far from Turing’s mind, as the refinement that he offers in the next paragraph attests: There are, however, special remarks to be made about many of the disabilities that have been mentioned. The inability to enjoy strawberries and cream may have struck the reader as frivolous. Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic. What is important about this disability is that it contributes to some of the other disabilities, e.g. to the difficulty of the same kind of friendliness occurring between man and machine as between white man and white man, or between black man and black man. To the brew of gender and sexuality, then, race is added, as “strawberries and cream” (earlier bookended between the ability to fall in love and the ability to make someone fall in love) becomes a code word for tastes that Turing prefers not to name.

The most common way to establish contact with our fellow men is through language. Yet like Strindberg, Bergman distrusts language as a means of communication in any deeper sense. We have already seen how Elisabet in Persona chooses muteness in the conviction that words equal lies. Taking Hummel’s remark in The Ghost Sonata to heart that languages are “codes” invented “to conceal the secrets of one tribe from the others,” Bergman often demonstrates how language rather than serve as a means of communication serves as a conscious or unconscious barrier. This idea is fundamental in The Silence, where the main characters are confronted with a language, construed by Bergman, which is as unintelligible to them as to us. The inability to understand the foreign language is here a metaphor for our inability to understand one another truly. While Anna in The Silence tries to communicate via the senses, her sister Ester, a professional translator, tries to do so via reason. In her attempt to understand the foreign language she is, like the Student in The Ghost Sonata, a seeker who tries to understand life intellectually. In the nightmarish exam scene of Wild Strawberries, professor emeritus Isak Borg, who has been a harsh examiner, finds himself in the position of his former students. It is now his turn to be harshly examined and to fail his exam. His failure is serious since the blackboard text Isak is unable to decipher tells what a doctor’s—read: man’s--primary duty is: to care for your fellow men. The sequence is a contamination of the Asylum scene in To Damascus I and the school scene in A Dream Play. In the former the Stranger is condemned for the wrongs he has done to his fellow men, in the latter the Officer, recently conferred doctor, finds himself returned to primary school. In Wild Strawberries we have a thematic counterpart of the school scene when young Sara tells Isak, as she holds a mirror in front of his face, that although he knows a lot, he knows in fact almost nothing—that is, about the essentials of life. When Tomas, the doubting priest in Winter Light sits down at one of the pupils’ desks in the local school, it is a discreet reminder that he, like Isak Borg and the Officer, needs to “mature” as it says in A Dream Play.

It was a pretty great picnic, if I do say so myself. I’d helped Mrs. B prepare it, and I enjoyed listening to Karina and my father ooh and ah as I took out tiny cherry tomatoes stuffed with spicy cheese filling; avocado, spinach, and red onion sandwiches with walnut oil vinaigrette on seven grain bread; mozzarella sandwiches with roasted red peppers and pickled mushrooms on Italian bread; peanut butter and apple butter sandwiches on whole wheat bread; new potato salad with dill; and grapes and strawberries and kiwi fruit salad with poppy seed dressing. Plus granola bars for snacks. “And for dessert we have cheesecake with raspberry sauce,” I announced, taking the last bottle of sparkling water out of the cooler.

My period began when I was eleven years old, three months after DeAnne thought it had. I woke up one morning to stickiness between my legs and the smell of raw meat in my bed. There was no one to tell. The news had preceded the occurrence. I practiced saying it anyway, "My periodblueberrymuffin starteduunsaltedbutter today oatmeal." This was a comforting sentence for me. I had just learned the trick of stringing together words to produce the tastes that I wanted. I was particularly fond of this thread: "walnut, elephant, candle, jogger." These words brought forth the following in this satisfying order: ham steak, sugar-cured and pan-fried; sweet potatoes baked with lots of butter; 7UP (though more of the lime than the lemon, like when it's icy cold); fresh strawberries, sweet and ripe.

My period began when I was eleven years old, three months after DeAnne thought it had. I woke up one morning to stickiness between my legs and the smell of raw meat in my bed. There was no one to tell. The news had preceded the occurrence. I practiced saying it anyway, "My periodblueberrymuffin startedunsaltedbutter todayoatmeal." This was a comforting sentence for me. I had just learned the trick of stringing together words to produce the tastes that I wanted. I was particularly fond of this thread: "walnut, elephant, candle, jogger." These words brought forth the following in this satisfying order: ham steak, sugar-cured and pan-fried; sweet potatoes baked with lots of butter; 7UP (though more of the lime than the lemon, like when it's icy cold); fresh strawberries, sweet and ripe.

Needing to shake off the negative energy, I decide to prepare one of the desserts---something sweet to take away the sour taste of fear infiltrating my mouth. I'm going to tackle the strawberry and lavender sorbet---the herb from Garrance's rooftop garden, the strawberries sweet and juicy. Thankfully, the recipe is easy---especially when you have three Thermomix machines at your disposal. After commandeering most of the ingredients, I smell the lavender Garrance had bestowed upon us and another fantasy sets in. Charles and I are running through a field bursting with purple flowers in the South of France, smiling and laughing. We're kissing, softly at first, and then we're naked, exploring each other's bodies, his rippled stomach, and floating on a cloud made from the fragrance of the lavender---sweet and woodsy--- "Kate, where'd you go? You look all dreamy," says Charles. "Nowhere. Just thinking," I say. "You're sexy as hell when you think. You bite those full lips of yours and it's kind of distracting when I'm trying to work.

When I return, Charles stands at my station and he says, "Come here. You have to taste this." I set the bottle down and step up to him. He holds out a berry, but before I can reach for it, he places it in his mouth, half sticking out. He pulls me toward him and raises his brows. I'm so into this. My lips part and we're like human forms of Lady and the Tramp---our lips touching, a quick chew, and our tongues meet. I'm not trembling from fear of the paparazzi anymore but from full-blown lust. When we separate, Charles licks his lips and traces my mouth with his finger. "That was the best damn strawberry I've ever eaten. You're delicious, Kate---

Say that this resurrection was general enough to include my grandmother, and Helen, my mother. Say that Helen lifted our hair from our napes with her cold hands and gave us strawberries from her purse. Say that my grandmother pecked our brows with her whiskery lips, and then all of them went down the road to our house, my grandfather youngish and high-pocketed, just outside their conversation, like a difficult memory, or a ghost. Then Lucille and I could run off to the woods, leaving them to talk of old times, and make sandwiches for lunch and show each other snapshots.

Instead of focusing, in the style of the “neural correlates of consciousness” (NCC) approach, on a single exemplary conscious experience—like the experience of “seeing the color red”—Tononi and Edelman asked what was characteristic about conscious experiences in general. They made a simple but profound observation: that conscious experiences—all conscious experiences—are both informative and integrated. From this starting point, they made claims about the neural basis of every conscious experience, not just of specific experiences of seeing red, or feeling jealous, or suffering a toothache. The idea of consciousness as simultaneously informative and integrated needs a little unpacking. Let’s start with information. What does it mean to say that conscious experiences are “informative”? Edelman and Tononi did not mean this in the sense that reading a newspaper can be informative, but in a sense that, though it might at first seem trivial, conceals a great deal of richness. Conscious experiences are informative because every conscious experience is different from every other conscious experience that you have ever had, ever will have, or ever could have. Looking past the desk in front of me through the window beyond, I have never before experienced precisely this configuration of coffee cups, computer monitors, and clouds—an experience that is even more distinctive when combined with all the other perceptions, emotions, and thoughts that are simultaneously present in the background of my inner universe. At any one time, we have precisely one conscious experience out of vastly many possible conscious experiences. Every conscious experience therefore delivers a massive reduction of uncertainty, since this experience is being had, and not that experience, or that experience, and so on. And reduction of uncertainty is—mathematically—what is meant by “information.” The informativeness of a particular conscious experience is not a function of how rich or detailed it is, or of how enlightening it is to the person having that experience. Listening to Nina Simone while eating strawberries on a roller coaster rules out just as many alternative experiences as does sitting with eyes closed in a silent room, experiencing close to nothing. Each experience reduces uncertainty with respect to the range of possible experiences by the same amount. In this view, the “what-it-is-like-ness” of any specific conscious experience is defined not so much by what it is, but by all the unrealized but possible things that it is not. An experience of pure redness is the way that it is, not because of any intrinsic property of “redness,” but because red is not blue, green, or any other color, or any smell, or a thought or a feeling of regret or indeed any other form of mental content whatsoever. Redness is redness because of all the things it isn’t, and the same goes for all other conscious experiences.

What I'm saying is, you can walk down the street in any major city and hear a straight woman at brunch, spilling her strawberry mimosa, shouting, "I wish I was a lesbian-it'd make everything so much EASIER at anyone who'll hear her. Which like, okay, lots to unpack there-you know anyone can be gay, right? Like, if you want to date women, you just... can? Also, being gay isn't "easier"-have you heard of homophobia?

I hear from the sofa- ‘Wear a jacket, Karly!’ My mom thinks even when I’m dressed, I’m still half-naked. So, out the door, I see sis get on the yellow bus. Waving at me like a moron out the window! And the cold feels like a b*tch slap to my face, yet it is a good way to wake up. I got into the SUV that was wrecked the night before. Thinking that this thing is like a coffin to me, yet I could say anything, or Jenny would think I have completely lost my mind. So, we go down all the same roads, not stopping at any of the red or yellow lights or signs. When Liv gets into the car she leans forward and grabs my hot- chocolate, and the smell of her perfume is strawberry, it is a body spray she has been wearing devotedly ever senses she was twelve and her hips and boobs develop like the end of sixth grade, she buys like five bottles every time we go into Sally Beauty Supply. I know that she has it on her, so I ask her for a squirt, even though I am sick of it after all these years, and even though I don’t want to smell like her, I ask for it anyway, I don’t want to smell like balls! Even though it stopped being cool in seventh grade, to where kiddy stuff like she still does- I have to close my eyes, overwhelmed, and coffin as a puff of it surrounds me, or then what I asked for. Gross, I smell like a pre-teen after gym class now, just trying to cover it up. Closing my eyes was a horrible idea. One- I get to feeling car sick. Two- I can see where Jenny is driving, and the way it feels- it must be off the road. Three- I start to daydream about Marcel, plus heartsick over Ray still, even though I was done after what he did to me, I can stop having feelings for him, he was the first that took me from behind. Oh no, he was not my first love god no, I didn’t know what love was until I saw it in Marcel's eyes, but was it real? That is what I am afraid of- trusting my heart to a boy again. I could see all the flashes of sincere light within Marcel's home, I could see him holding as no boy has ever done with me. I could almost feel the tingle of his kiss on my lips. ‘Holy freaking crap balls,’ said Jenny. I snap my eyes open as Jenny swerves to avoid hitting a cuddly black cat, walking past. That is when I start to look out the window into the side mirror, and the glossy dark trees are flocking on either side of us like outlined ghosts in the navy-blue sky. I smell something hot. I said- ‘Yeah that’s just me.’ I hear Jenny shrieking not too long after I feel relaxed, and yet once more, I feel my stomach go to the bottom of my feet and back up, as the SUV rolls to the one side, tires wailing- ‘It was a family of deer this time, trying not to get murdered. You should have seen their faces. It’s like mine every time I ride in this SUV.

She keeps walking, so I keep following, making our way down a stone path that leads to a set of tiered gardens. It is magical back here, garden after garden, the first filled with herbs like Mama grows, rosemary and lavender and mint and sage. Beyond that is a rose garden. There must be fifty rosebushes in it, all with different-colored blooms. We keep walking, down to the third tier, where there are tended beds like Daddy's vegetable patch in our backyard. "Look at this," Keisha says. She stands beside row upon row of little green plants with thick green leaves. She kneels beside one of them and pulls back a leaf. There are small red strawberries growing underneath. She picks one and hands it to me. I've never eaten a strawberry that tastes like this before. It's so rich, with juice like honey. It's nothing like the ones Mama buys at Kroger.

Unfortunately, our brains don’t know the difference between regular sweeteners (like honey or sugar) and zero-calorie/artificial sweeteners (such as stevia, aspartame, or sucralose) or flavors from actual food (such as strawberries or chocolate) and zero-calorie-added flavors (including both natural and artificial food-like flavors). Do you remember the saying, “You can’t fool Mother Nature”? Well, these artificial sweeteners and added flavors actually are fooling Mother Nature, and it has definite consequences for our bodies. Our brains don’t understand that we have figured out how to make something that tastes like food but actually isn’t food, so they prepare for the calories … that never come.

I want to take ten gazillion photos and put them on Instagram, since I'm proud of myself for baking and decorating this cake when I was horny as fuck." "Did you just say...?" "Did I just say what, Lindsay?" He wanted her to repeat his words, damn him. "That you're horny as fuck?" she said. "Might have done," he said innocently, as he started removing his clothes. No, his apron. He was only removing his apron. She did the same and hung it on a peg, bumping into him in the process. An accident. She hadn't done that on purpose. But then she was in his arms again, and he was kissing her, and God, why was he so good at this? His hands slipped beneath her T-shirt, touching her skin above the waistband of her jeans. It was enough to nearly make her combust, and at the same time, it frustrated her. She wrapped a leg around him and tried to climb him like a tree. He laughed softly, in a way that made her insides turn into runny strawberry filling

One day, a flamingo walks in a supermarket and asks the shop assistant if he sells cranberries. The shop assistant says, "No, we do have raspberries and strawberries, but we don't sell cranberries." The flamingo goes home and returns the next day, “Good day, do you sell cranberries?”. Again, the shop assistant says they don’t. The flamingo leaves the shop, and returns the very next day. “Oh no, there he is again,” says the shop assistant to himself. And sure enough, the flamingo asks the shop assistant if the supermarket sells cranberries. This time, though, the shop assistant is so fed up with this annoying flamingo that he says, "No, flamingo, we don't sell cranberries! And if you come back tomorrow and ask me this same question again, I swear I will nail your beak to the floor of the supermarket!" The flamingo goes home again. The shop assistant can’t believe his eyes when he sees the flamingo walk through the door again, the next day. This time, the flamingo asks, “Do you have any nails?” The shop assistant says, "No, we don’t have any nails." "Okay, good,” the flamingo says, “Do you sell cranberries?

Then she remembered robin’s nests and rainbows and redbud trees and long drives big skies soft, worn blankets black-eyed Susans hammock naps treehouses red-eared sliders acorn wreaths fairy rings birthday crowns cupcake dinners honeysuckle lake water fried catfish summer storms moments of shared intuition the autumn tree line at dusk being enveloped by the warm C of a loving body being the enveloper being in the presence of Someone who believes you have something worthwhile to say being the one to whom important things are said and bird wrists and twig fingers and strawberry moons

Waiting for the perfect love?” “No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.

When anyone from seaboard or country caught leprosy, they left relatives and friends and went to Pratofungo to spend the rest of their lives waiting for the disease to devour them. There were rumours of great jollifications to greet each new arrival; from afar songs and music were to be heard coming from the lepers' houses till night-fall. Many things were said of Pratofungo, although no healthy person had ever been there; but all rumours were agreed in saying that life there was a perpetual party. Before becoming a leper colony the village had been a great place for prostitutes and visited by sailors of every race and religion; and the women there, it seemed, still kept the licentious habits of those times. The lepers did no work on the land. except for a vine-yard of strawberry grapes whose juice kept them the whole year round in a state of simmering tipsiness. The lepers spent most of their time playing strange instruments of their own invention, such as harps with little bells attached to the string, and singing in falsetto, and painting eggs with daubs of every colour as if for a perpetual Easter.

Max caught the rapidly melting ice cream on his tongue. With his mouth half full, he said in a deliberately casual tone: "I'm going to write children's books. I've got a couple of ideas." [...] Max pulled his notebook from his back pocket and read aloud: "The old master magician was wondering when a brave girl might finally come along and dig him up from the garden where he had lain forgotten under the strawberries for a century and a half..." "Or the story of the little cow [...] the holy cow that always has to take the blame. I imagine that even the holy cow used to be a young calf once, before people started saying, 'holy cow, what did you say you want to be? A writer?' " Max grinned. "And another one about Claire, a girl who swaps bodies with her kitty cat." [...] "... and the one where little Bruno complains to the guardians of heaven about the family they lumbered him with... " [...] "... and when people's shadows go back to straighten their owners' childhoods out a bit..." Wonderful, thought Jean. I'll send my shadow back in time to straighten my life out. How tempting. How sadly impossible.

year old girl in the seventh grade, with strawberry blonde hair tied back in plaits. Mom says it makes me look like Pippi Longstocking because of the few freckles that sprinkle my face. I live in my denim shorts mostly and I wear loom bands all

Love is like recognition. It’s the moment when you catch sight of someone and you think There is someone I have business with in this life. There is someone I was born to know. Has that never happened to you?” “It has, but I never took much comfort in it.” - Your Highlight on page 496 | location 7599-7603 | Added on Saturday, 5 July 2014 13:09:06 “Love is like a baby sleeping on its mother’s breast,” Steppan said. “Inchoate and likely to piss itself?” “Ah, you can play at being a cynic, my friend, but I’ve known you too long. You’re a romantic at heart. You’re in love with the world.” “I’d say I’m inchoate and likely to piss myself,” Asa Love is like falling from a window and discovering you can fly.” “Unlikely to happen and dangerous to try.” “Love is like the burst of sweetness when you bite into a strawberry.” “Brief for you and painful for the berry.” “Love,” Asa said, “is like a pigeon shitting over a crowd.” “How so?” “Where it lands hasn’t got much to do with who deserves it.” The priest made a deep sound in his throat, and frowned. “I think you may be confusing love with a different kind of longing,” he said,

Then there is the curse of the prophet. You know, the one that says any two people that put Christ first can make a relationship work? That is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because it is a simple truth. A curse because people still have that nasty free agency thing, and then, most people don’t read the fine print. Yeah, it is true, but I have to be interested in the person before I can really be certain I want to put Christ first with them. Like ice cream, I have my flavor profile. I like chocolate. I love chocolate with raspberries and brownie bites. I am not a fan of chocolate covered chicken hearts. I am very certain that a chocolate covered poo is still a poo and no amount of chocolate is going to make me interested. So, I have to find my flavor profile first. Of course, there are the aesthetics of chocolate: I like my chocolate brown, especially dark. I don’t understand red velvet (I didn’t even know it was a chocolate until recently…), and white chocolate is just some weird animal parading around in a chocolate suit. I want chocolate with raspberries and brownie bites, but I am also happy with mint chocolate, or mint with chocolate chips. I also like Rocky Road; the list goes on. But I am not a fan of strawberry, unless it is covered in chocolate. That’s just how I roll. If I find someone that I think is my flavor profile, I get excited, but I also get fearful “Dang it, I am going to have to call the NSA to figure this out. Again.

Could I speak to you for a moment, madam?' said Nannie to Agnes. It was at moments of crisis like this that Mary chiefly envied her Aunt Agnes's imperturbable disposition. Most mothers feel a hideous sinking at the heart when these fatal words are pronounced, but Agnes only showed a kindly and inactive interest. In anyone else Mary might have suspected unusual powers of bluff, hiding trembling knees, a feeling of helpless nausea, flashes of light behind the eyes, storm in the brain, and a general desire to say 'Take double your present wages, but don't tell me what it is you want to speak to me about.' But Agnes, placidly confident in the perfection of her own family and the unassailable security of her own existence, was only capable of feeling a mild curiosity and barely capable of showing it.

bottom line: INVITE PLANTS TO EVERY MEAL I’ve never been an advocate for changing everything overnight—it’s better to focus on one small thing you can do today and do it well. Over time, small daily changes and little victories lead to massive shifts. You can’t blink and just say, “Adios ice cream and Snickers bars and hello kale chips and green smoothies.” That would be setting yourself up for a quick relapse. Start by inviting plants to every meal. If you’re buying ice cream, get one with real strawberries in it. If you’re making grilled cheese, add a vegetable-based soup to the menu. You’ll be surprised by how delicious that additional “guest” makes the meal, and soon you’ll begin to crave it and the veggie portion size will increase. Every recipe in this book invites a plant or two to the table…and oftentimes they are the guests of honor!

Do you know much about Hogsmeade?" asked Hermione keenly. "I've read it's the only entirely non-Muggle settlement in Britain-" "Yeah, I think it is," said Ron in an offhand sort of way, "but that's not why I want to go. I just want to get inside Honeydukes!" "What's that?" said Hermione. "It's the sweetshop," said Ron, a dreamy look coming over his face, "where they've got everything.... Pepper Imps- they make you smoke at the mouth- and great fat Chocoballs full of strawberry mousse and clotted cream, and really excellent sugar quills, which you can suck in class and just look like you're thinking what to write next-" "But Hogsmeade's a very interesting place, isn't it?" Hermione pressed on eagerly. "In Sites of Historical Society it says the inn was the headquarters for the 1612 goblin rebellion, and the Shrieking Shack's supposed to be the most severely haunted building in Britain-" "- and massive sherbert balls that make you levitate a few inches off the ground while you're sucking them," said Ron, who was plainly not listening to a word Hermione was saying.

The most common way to establish contact with our fellow men is through language. Yet like Strindberg, Bergman distrusts language as a means of communication in any deeper sense. We have already seen how Elisabet in Persona chooses muteness in the conviction that words equal lies. Taking Hummel’s remark in The Ghost Sonata to heart that languages are “codes” invented “to conceal the secrets of one tribe from the others,” Bergman often demonstrates how language rather than serve as a means of communication serves as a conscious or unconscious barrier. This idea is fundamental in The Silence, where the main characters are confronted with a language, construed by Bergman, which is as unintelligible to them as to us. The inability to understand the foreign language is here a metaphor for our inability to understand one another truly. While Anna in The Silencetries to communicate via the senses, her sister Ester, a professional translator, tries to do so via reason. In her attempt to understand the foreign language she is, like the Student in The Ghost Sonata, a seeker who tries to understand life intellectually. In the nightmarish exam scene of Wild Strawberries, professor emeritus Isak Borg, who has been a harsh examiner, finds himself in the position of his former students. It is now his turn to be harshly examined and to fail his exam. His failure is serious since the blackboard text Isak is unable to decipher tells what a doctor’s—read: man’s--primary duty is: to care for your fellow men. The sequence is a contamination of the Asylum scene in To Damascus I and the school scene in A Dream Play. In the former the Stranger is condemned for the wrongs he has done to his fellow men, in the latter the Officer, recently conferred doctor, finds himself returned to primary school. In Wild Strawberries we have a thematic counterpart of the school scene when young Sara tells Isak, as she holds a mirror in front of his face, that although he knows a lot, he knows in fact almost nothing—that is, about the essentials of life. When Tomas, the doubting priest in Winter Light sits down at one of the pupils’ desks in the local school, it is a discreet reminder that he, like Isak Borg and the Officer, needs to “mature” as it says in A Dream Play.

You don't know what to do with the jam jar, the chicken stink, the sinister mountain fog that is everywhere, but the adults pretend to ignore when you are in the room. It seems the only thing you can do is listen for it. You hear it in the four measures of Vivaldi's "Winter" that you can still remember from Sarah and the Squirrel, and once you make the connection between the music and mountain fog you play the notes over and over again inside your head. You paw up the trash-strewn ravine. The sky is low and gray, the color of the cinder blocks the men in your town manufacture from ash and dust. The dirt-filled strawberry jam jar is in your denim coat pocket. Vivaldi is in your head. The music you hear is like the blaze-orange clothing the men wear on the mountainsides while deer hunting in autumn. The music is like a bulletproof vest, a coiled copperhead, a rabies shot. The music is both a warning and a talisman. The music tells you things: You're not imagining this. Better children than you die in the snow for no reason. The music says: What's hidden beneath this picture of strawberry jam? The music says: This isn't a Disney movie. Death doesn't just take the wicked villain. Look at that dirt in the jar. It will take you. It will take everyone, and everyone, and everyone. The music says: What you feel is real. Follow me. Run.

Strawberry milk,” I say, eyeing him as we head toward the counter. “Really.” He turns to me. “Do you have something to say about my snack selections?” “Nope.” I fall into line behind him. “I just didn’t realize you were a middle-school girl going to a slumber party.” “And I,” he says, plunking his strawberry-fest down on the counter, “didn’t realize you were a soccer mom justifying her chocolate craving with the fact that raisins are a fruit.

When they say every flavor, they mean every flavor- you know, you get all the ordinary ones like chocolate and peppermint and marmalade, but then you can get spinach and liver and tripe. George reckons he had a booger-flavored one once." Ron picked up a green bean, looked at it carefully, and bit into a corner. "Bleaaargh- see? Sprouts?" They had a good time eating the Every Flavor Beans. Harry got toast, coconut, baked bean, strawberry, curry, grass, coffee, sardine, and was even brave enough to nibble the end off a funny gray one Ron wouldn't touch, which turned out to be pepper.

it is queer how when you got time by yourself & are getting on in life your brain can play tricks You might be having a normal morning Putting sheep shit on the vegetables & then for no reason at all you get this wave of memory come over you so strong you have to sit down there in the dirt for fear you might keel over probably some stupid little memory Something you haven’t thought of for years But it comes back so strong you feel undone You have no defence against it & then you’re crying into the shit & strawberry plants & no one can tell you to stop it or hand you their dirty pocket rag to dry your eyes with, because there’s no one left You finally got the Peace & Quiet you thought you was after all these years & now that it’s here, you wish there was something to fill it back up again. I say You but I mean Me These days I live more in my mind than on the ground The Past seems more real than what I spend my time doing.

Jeremiah lowered himself into his chair, turned to the first page of The Phantom of the Opera, and started to read aloud. “The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as long believed, a creature of the imagination . . .” He read to himself the next few lines and expressed the following. “Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say of a spectral shade.” Jeremiah thought for a moment. It’s rather like me. It could have been an apt description of him before Miss Herman walked into his life with a plate of strawberry scones and a jug of lemonade. He had walked around like a phantom. Yes, he had been alive, but it had been a grim, lonely sort of life where he had shut people out. Funny what a little kindness can do, he told himself and went back to reading.

I can’t say why this film [Wild Strawberries] materialised. But I know that the important thing is to use myself both as tree and axe. In the end that’s all I have.

models of leadership for the young people: the strawberry as leader of the berries, the eagle as leader of the birds. “It reminds them that much is expected of them eventually. It says this is what it means to be a good leader, to have vision, and to be generous, to sacrifice on behalf of the people. Like the maple, leaders are the first to offer their gifts.” It reminds the whole community that leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom.

Your trousers!" she gasped when he followed some curiosity he found down the curve of her jaw. "They're wet." She could feel how drenched they'd become, absorbing the moisture of her desire, the friction creating a stronger, slicker surge followed by a shocking burst of pleasure as he ground them harder against her. "I don't care," he growled, passing his thumbs over her pebbled nipples in tandem, claiming her mouth and swallowing her startled cry as he rocked his hips against her again, and yet another time. Her thighs trembled, her stomach clenched, and a delight for which she had no name spread like a flood of fire through her limbs. "This pleases you?" He did it again, his own groan rumbling against her lips. Pleased her? More than strawberry tarts and decadent desserts. More than she'd pleased herself with him watching. More pleasure than she'd ever imagined her body capable of producing. But she could say none of those things, so she just hissed a "Yes!" as her muscles began some sort of ascension she didn't yet understand. With each of his movements, and every one of his kisses, the glorious sensation intensified, electrified, until, unable to help herself, her head dug into the bed and her hips peeled off it. Her body bowed with a jerking, pulsing ecstasy so acute, she felt as though she was lost in an apoplexy. Her heart raced, forcing her blood into each extremity, and then stalled, only to charge again. She thought she heard her name. She knew she gasped illogical things. Maybe screamed words, but couldn't hear them, or for the life of her, remember what they were. Perhaps the same incoherent tongues spoken by the evangelicals whilst taken in rapture, for surely that's what this was.

She studies my face for a second before sighing and adding, “I had an ex-boyfriend who used to tell me I only got opportunities handed to me because I’m a woman, not because I’m a good player. Because I…” she trails off and swallows. “Anyway. Once you hear the same thing so many times, you start to think it’s true.” My hand flexes at my side. I narrow my eyes. Irritation rips through me, and I have the urge to hurt someone really fucking bad. “You dated this guy?” I ask, and she nods. “I don’t know jack shit about relationships, but putting your girlfriend down because you don’t like watching her become more successful than you doesn’t seem like someone I would want to be around.” “We all do dumb shit when we’re young and in love. Play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. Mine happened to be an asshole who liked to make me feel small while he was the one with the tiny dick.” I choke on a laugh. “How tiny are we talking?” Emerson holds up her fingers barely four inches apart. “That tiny.” “I need to send you a fruit basket and offer my condolences.” “I’m allergic to strawberries.” “Noted. You gonna give me a name?” I ask. “Nope,” she answers. “I have friends who could track him down. They could hack into his computer if you ever feel like retaliating.” “Who the hell are you friends with?” “Stop wanting to know things about me,” I say smugly. “I’m going to think you like me, Red.” “If your ego gets any bigger, there’s not going to be any room for us in the hallway.” “You could stand closer to me, if you want.

know that I was once someone who loved to dance in the kitchen whilst I baked,” I say, my voice catching. “I was once someone who laughed at stupid jokes until her belly ached and tears poured from her eyes. I was once a girl who liked to walk in the rain, who loved to watch the sun set, who collected china dolls, who found pleasure in the simple things life offered. I was someone who loved tulips and strawberry cheesecake, who would like to go on picnics and drink red wine, and eat smelly cheese, who would sing badly in the shower, who’d wear the clothes she loved, not the ones I was forced to wear. I was once a woman who had passion in her heart and fire in her soul. Now look at me.

How does she know it’s a boy?” Ash mutters to me. “Therapist magic,” I say. “It has a penis,” Millie says, still petting the fuzz ball.

The strawberry, he informs us, is a member of the rose family and its botanical name, Fragaria, means "fragrance." And while most people know it is the only fruit with seeds on the outside, it is actually not fruit at all but swollen stems. It is one of the few fruits to contain ellagic acid, a compound believed to prevent healthy cells from turning into carcinogenic ones. My classmates cluck their tongues at this. "And the best way to cook the fraises," he says in his distinct fresh accent, "is to barely cook them at all. Which is why my strawberry crème brûlée is so fantastic. Quick to make, delicious, and the texture of the berry remains firm." Combining strawberries in rum, sour cream, and cream plus a dash of fresh lemon juice in a bowl, he tosses the mixture and spoons it into ramekins. Ideally, he says, the strawberry mixture should be refrigerated for several hours to meld the flavors. However, since we're on a time crunch, he sprinkles each with brown sugar before sliding them under the broiler so the tops turn a crusty caramel in seconds.

Finally Carl shook his head angrily, found the hardest tongue-twister for foreigners to say in Danish, and yelled: “Rødgrød med fløde!” (“Strawberries with cream!”)

That’s just life, you know? Things work out, things don’t. It’s really not about us. We think it is, and we hear it is all the time, but it’s not about our success necessarily, it’s about living for the Lord. We get so confused, and that’s where a lot of our stress comes from. We put it on ourselves, but God doesn’t demand that we’re successful in the world’s eyes, He doesn’t even demand that we’re monetarily successful. He does tell us that we have to work, because the Bible says that a man who won’t provide for his family is worse than an infidel, but he doesn’t say that our businesses or anything that we try always has to work out.

Eva’s friend gave her perfume one year, a scent made especially for Eva. AJ was green with envy, so for her twelfth birthday, Eva told her she was getting a special perfume for her too. My wife was sick at that point, real sick, so she was doing everything she could to make AJ happy. She asked AJ what scent she wanted, and AJ says—” he snorts in amusement “—strawberries and roses.” I laugh too, because now it makes total sense why I could never figure it out. Roses and strawberries. Two completely different fragrances, yet somehow, when combined, they work. They’re Allie.

Next time,” I say in an attempt to get his attention, “order strawberry cheesecake.” “Noted.” “And granola.” “Sure.” “And strawberry protein bars.” “Will do.” “You should also consider getting a TV. You know, like normal people.” He lowers the paper, his glasses amplifying the sharpness in his eyes. “Anything else?” “I’ll make a list.

How many siblings do you have?” “Three sisters. The oldest is Charity. She’s twenty-eight. Then there’s Serenity, who is twenty-four. And Hope is twenty-two.” Mason’s eyebrow raised slightly, and I knew where his thoughts probably headed. Our names. Yes, we were all named after virtues. And yes, I was fully aware of the ridiculousness. “So…Charity, Serenity, Hope and Felicity?” “Between you and me”—I leaned toward him—“Charity is the most selfish person I know. Serenity is borderline crazy and nobody is more pessimistic than Hope. And me…well, I’m a ball of anger.” He laughed. “I wasn’t going to say a thing.” I stared at him. He grinned. “Okay, I was. And point taken.” I smiled. “My sisters are actually great. But so help me God, I’ll never give my children matching names, nor will I choose ones that will forever be their defining characteristic. I mean, c’mon, it’s like we were set up for failure.” He laughed. “So what’s your full name?” “Felicity Anne Daniels.” “Your initials are—” “Fad. Yes. I know. My parents are awful, and I can never get anything monogrammed.” “Hey, it’s not so bad. I’m named after a jar.” “Doesn’t ‘Mason’ originate from, like, a stoneworker or something?” “Yeah, but my mom literally got it from the jar. Apparently, she loved eating my great-grandma’s homemade preserves while pregnant with me. One day, she’s staring at the canning jar and thinks I should name my baby Mason. The rest is history.” I covered my mouth to hide my laugh. “Well, it could be worse. You could be named after what was in the jar.” “No shit. I’m pretty sure if I’d been a girl I’d be named Strawberry.

I waited on strawberry dawn. Sick with the want for the sun to crest over the bedrock seam, say something to me. Tell me a word from another place. Say that it hadn't been goodbye. Say it had been see you later.

I want to put joy into the world. I want to help my friends, to build a future for my daughter. This is the time to put aside those things that try to hold us down. Time to say goodbye to the dead, and to celebrate the living. Everything is ready now: candles from the market, lined up in wine-bottle holders; incense from my own supply, ready to sweeten the troubled air. My mother's cards in their sandalwood box. And a dozen little red sachets, made from scavenged scarlet silk, one for every month in the year, and filled with a combination of herbs: lavender for peace of mind; marigold, for friendship; strawberry leaf for good fortune; hawthorn for protection; mandrake for power; cedar for strength; and in each, a scrap of paper with a secret invocation to the dead: a prayer for future prosperity; a light against the darkness.

Ikaria Lean Belly Juice Reviews and Complaints (November 2025) – Doctor's Warning, Real User Results & Hidden Side Effects (ojd) ## Ikaria Lean Belly Juice: A Comprehensive Review for 2025 Ikaria Lean Belly Juice has garnered significant attention in 2025 as a health supplement promising weight loss and improved metabolism. Its popularity stems from both compelling marketing and enthusiastic user testimonials. However, like any popular product, it has also faced scrutiny and skepticism. This review aims to provide a balanced and objective analysis based on available research, user feedback, and expert opinions. CLICK HERE TO Visit The Official Website CLICK HERE TO Visit The Official Website CLICK HERE TO Visit The Official Website ### What is Ikaria Lean Belly Juice? Ikaria Lean Belly Juice is a powdered supplement designed to be mixed with water or a beverage of your choice. It is marketed as a solution to address stubborn belly fat and improve overall metabolic health. The manufacturer claims it targets specific physiological pathways using a blend of natural ingredients. ### How Does Ikaria Lean Belly Juice Work? The core concept behind Ikaria Lean Belly Juice revolves around targeting "ceramides," which the manufacturer describes as compounds that contribute to fat accumulation, organ clogging, and a sluggish metabolism. The formula aims to flush out these ceramides, support liver health (the body's primary fat-burning organ), and promote overall well-being. Unlike many conventional weight loss products that focus solely on calorie restriction or appetite suppression, Ikaria Lean Belly Juice takes a more holistic approach by addressing internal factors like liver function and toxin buildup. ### A Doctor's Perspective "I've seen varied results with Ikaria Lean Belly Juice in my practice," says Dr. Robert Martinez, MD, specializing in Integrative & Functional Medicine. "Some patients report positive experiences aligning with clinical literature, while others experience minimal change. A balanced perspective is crucial." ### Key Ingredients and Their Potential Benefits Ikaria Lean Belly Juice contains a variety of ingredients. Here's a breakdown of some key components and their purported benefits: * **Blueberry Powder:** Rich in antioxidants, supporting brain and body health. * **Strawberry Extract:** Another source of antioxidants, helping to combat oxidative stress. * **Black Currant & Extract:** May reduce inflammation and boost immunity. * **Acai Extract:** Promoted for its potential heart and skin health benefits. * **Beet Root:** Supports healthy blood flow and energy levels. * **Hibiscus:** May help lower blood pressure and reduce bloating. * **African Mango & Extract:** Marketed to support appetite control and metabolism. * **Milk Thistle (Silymarin):** Aims to support liver health, metabolize fat, break down visceral fat, and target toxins. * **Taraxacum (Dandelion & Root):** Intended to support optimal digestion and liver health. * **Fucoxanthin:** A marine carotenoid that some believe can boost metabolism and block fat absorption. * **EGCG (from Green Tea):** May support healthy blood pressure and heart health, potentially aiding fat oxidation. * **Panax Ginseng:** Could support healthy gut bacteria, change calorie burn patterns, shrink fat cells, and boost metabolism. * **Resveratrol:** Aims to help prevent weight gain, reduce fat mass, and increase lean mass. * **Citrus Pectin:** Intended to aid fat loss by optimizing digestion, delaying stomac

Yamanashi is green, dense with red pine and white oak forest and beautifully kept orchards that cut deep into its slopes. Fruit hunters pay to eat as much ripe, seasonal fruit as they like in a short span of time. Say, thirty minutes of thin-skinned peaches, or fat pink grapes, or strawberries, warmed from the sun, dipped into pools of sweetened condensed milk.

The nerve you have to say gross to strawberry when you eat frozen toothpaste is appalling.