On the street today...strawberries.

I noticed something unusual today: a woman holding a container of strawberries. No fancy packaging, no creamy extras, no shiny-icey whatever. Just strawberries. Usually it's some sort of over-priced, overly complex iced coffee beverage or some high energy super duper bang bang smoothey that I see in my fellow city-zens' hands. And perhaps this woman, with her modest snack of fruit, made me think of simpler (wiser) people.* (Okay, actually, first the phrase "free to be you and me" came to mind because of her short, spiked hair and teenaged-boy-cum-lesbian saggy jeans--but I digress.) Then I wondered for a moment why we Washingtonians/Americans are so complex and removed from good sense, so forced by convenience or fashion that we require so much processing and adornment. I realized at that moment, that it was rare to see something so unadulterated as fresh fruit as a portable snack--that this was progressive woman. And by progressive, I mean weird...and smarter than me. So I ate the melted bite-sized Snickers that was in my purse.

*Fresh fruit is the snack of choice in southeast Asia. On a vacation there, I remember being awed by the walking street vendors who carried baskets full of fresh fruit that they rigged onto the ends of long bamboo canes to sell to (mostly) locals for just pennies.