I've just eaten for the first time in years, strawberries that are good just as themselves. No sugar or cream necessary. They have flavor! They're sweet! They're picked ripe!

No mortal strawberry can ever meet the deliciousness of the strawberries my sister and I picked one early summer day from our Uncle Delma's patch in NC. We ate a bunch of them as we picked, even though the aim was to fill a pie that Aunt Leota would make.

But these are the best since.

PS to jtglover in case you're reading this: I got them at Good Foods; they're picked from a local farm, name's something like Olympian. 

catrambo (or at least her husband) is dreaming of living on a boat.

For me it's a trailer like my grandparents' old trailer. Grandpa built in the furniture, including a cool dining booth with a table top that had a checker board stained into the wood. The bedroom was just that: the bed took up the entire room. Everything could be opened up for storage. The walls were paneled in smooth, honey colored wood. Grandma and Grandpa went everywhere in their trailer, but especially Mexico and Florida.

When they got too old to handle driving it, the trailer became their guest cottage. My sister and I lived there for a summer when we moved back to the mainland from Hawaii, while my parents went househunting in VA (their own vacation from us, too, I guess). It was fun, even if kinda scary giant bugs perched on the screens at night, eyes glowing (NC summer grows big bugs).

In reality, maybe Bruce and I would go nuts living in such a small place, but in my dreams it's our cozy retirement vehicle to freedom. To (almost) quote Cat, "But still. It looks pretty cool."

The following is from a comment I made on Heather's (VPXI) wonderful blog, in response to her posts Places that are lost and Day of the Dead. Please be sure to check out these beautiful pictures and Heather's essays on (my interpretation) memory.

In sixth grade, my best friend and I had a place we called "the sacred place." It was in a meadow. A fallen tree was there, and we would sit on it and tell each other the secrets of our burgeoning sexuality. In a story, the fallen tree would have been a premonition. The meadow is long since developed into housing.

Many places of my childhood are lost, but I moved around so much, maybe I don’t care as much. Always new horizons. But sometimes I wish my grandparents, long dead, still lived in their little pink and green house in North Carolina. We would always visit there, between moves, and I would go around and look at everything, enjoying that they were still the same as they'd been the last time. I was sad when I learned that the young couple who bought it got divorced.

Mr. Saiga's account mirrors the island. In his passion to photograph the passing island are the seeds of his own decay as an artist. Even as he's beginning, he's ending. "But however unskillful the pictures might have been, I honestly feel that my desire to take photographs then was stronger than it is now."

(Heather said:) "I was always one of those weird people who were conscious of things going away, I don't know why." Maybe you have Buddhist karma. You know deep inside the truth of Samsara, the floating world. Or Italian karma. In Venice, they put little posters of the dead on the walls in the sestieri: a picture and the name and dates, and maybe a little tribute. Paper shrines.

It's funny to be so connected with impermanence, isn't it? Seems paradoxical.