For as long as I can remember, my life has been sprinkled with Strawberry Afternoons.
When I was little, they looked like seeing Ice Princess in theaters and immediately coming home to put on the softest pair of socks I owned so I could slide across the tile like a private ice skating performance no one asked for.
Eating Play-Doh with my best friend until we both felt medically unwell but emotionally fulfilled.
My dad coming home from a business trip.
My mom dropping a fork mid-dinner and announcing “there’s going to be company!” — one of those household superstitions — and then our neighbor actually showing up unannounced like she had summoned her herself.
Later they looked like a flirty note making it across the classroom undetected.
Playing board games (and winning) with my sister and brother-in-law after work when I’m home for the holidays.
The phone call telling me my biopsy was benign.
Meeting my partner on a beach in Portugal on a Monday, as if Mondays occasionally agree to behave.
And they still look like finding $20 in a coat pocket.
Feeling the muscle memory of a childhood sleepover when, as adults, your schedules somehow align.
The orange juice actually being fresh squeezed.
Going on a walk and accidentally ending up two hours later in the most delicious underground restaurant in K-town.
They’ve never really changed — only the backdrop has.
They’re independent of age.
Independent of place.
Independent of time — it’s afternoon somewhere, right?
A Strawberry Afternoon isn’t a big day.
It’s a small moment that refuses to stay small.
You don’t schedule it. You don’t optimize it. You barely notice it while it’s happening. And then years later it’s filed in your memory under why life felt good then.
It doesn’t look important until it becomes a core memory.
Maybe that’s all a life really is — Strawberry Afternoons strung together, with everything else just connecting them.
This is a place to collect those before they slip back into regular time.
Until the next strawberry afternoon,
Tori