An Avoidance of Strawberries

I love strawberries.

Strawberries are dark, dark red, my favorite color. Strawberries are the right balance of sweet and tart. Strawberries have seeds, but they are small enough to be decoration and not an irritation. They also happen to have a beautiful summer-green handle.

Strawberries are yummy in smoothies. Strawberries are fantastic on their own. And strawberries are simply perfect dipped in sour cream and brown sugar.

I love strawberries.

We recently discovered during the height of strawberry season that they can do very bad things to me. Well, not very bad things. Just embarrassing ones like making my cheeks swell to twice their size (inside and outside) so that I was biting the inside whenever I shut my mouth. I had flashbacks to what I looked like when I was four.

Strawberries are one of the most pesticide covered fruits, so we decided to see if organic ones gave me as much trouble. Turns out, I can still have them, I just have to have the right kind. 😉

Last night my mom bought strawberries to go with dinner. She so-very-sweetly intended to get a package of organic strawberries just so I could have them too, but it turns out the store had stocked regular ones in that spot and–no strawberries for me.

Someone thought to serve the leftovers for breakfast. It took some reminding (a couple times, actually) for me to keep myself from accidentally eating some. And then the last few were sliced up and served as a salad topping with lunch. I *almost* ate some again.

There’s a strawberry of another kind I’ve been avoiding, and even more so lately. The news. The news is interesting since, after all, it does tell a story. The news is curiosity satisfying since everyone around me is talking about it. And reading the news smacks of being “well-informed”.

But I have a very bad reaction to it. Well, not a very bad reaction, but an unhealthy one. I feel a strange mixture of fear, anger, and a huge dose of anxiety about things that don’t affect me at all. Things that I have no power to change and not enough information about to even understand.

It is good to be well-informed. It is good to understand what others are talking about. It is also good to be a peaceful person and to save your God-given emotional energy and empathy for things closer to home. And some news now and then really isn’t that bad for me, as long as it’s the right kind. 😉

 

Some happy news (and be careful of ads and sidebar):

1. A golden retriever puppy rings his doorbell to be let back into the house.
2. A 91-year-old man hands out chocolate bars to strangers. ❤
3. Navy vets have a reunion with the man their crew “adopted” as a baby.