It is hard for me to figure out words to name my particular shade of hair. Somewhere between blond and redhead, my hair tends to look somewhere between gold and copper, but more red when it is cut. Do I consider myself blonde and deal with the insufferable jokes about stupidity and vapidity that are made about blondes, or do I consider myself a redhead, with the reputation for extreme levels of flirtation and coquetry that tend to attach themselves to redheads. Somehow, as is common in my life, I end up somewhere close to the border between the two, so I call myself strawberry blonde, to represent the two sides of that border I happen to be near.

The irony of calling myself strawberry blonde relates to my childhood [1]. As a college student I was in a particularly poetic mood one time and I wrote a folk rock song called “Strawberry Blonde” about my childhood. I grew up outside of the small town of Plant City, Florida, which is famous for being the Winter Strawberry capital of the world. Every year in March or so there is an annual strawberry festival held next door to my junior high school, where people come to appreciate strawberry shortcake, carnival rides, and country music. During elementary school I took a field trip to one of my classmates’ family’s strawberry farms and picked strawberries for a few hours. On the downside, this was probably against some child labor laws, but on the plus side, I have always been fond of strawberries, so eating a flat of fresh strawberries with my family was enjoyable, even if it was a bit irksome that they shared in the fruits of my youthful labor. For several years, my family rented a single-wide trailer from a strawberry farmer who hired seasonal migrant labor (who were always stealing our legos) and who was a leading member of an effort to secede from Hillsborough County. Some of my earliest friends (which is what I talked about in the song) were themselves from the underground of Spanish-speaking agricultural labor that existed in my area during the time of my youth (and that probably still exist there, even though I have not lived in that community for almost two decades).

I have always enjoyed eating strawberries and drinking strawberry smoothies and otherwise enjoying the lovely red fruit that so defined the area of my childhood. Yet that enjoyment had a dark side as well, as there was a stark difference between the elites who owned the fields and would diversity their businesses to add restaurants or wineries to their portfolios and the extremely poor people whose children would be held back in school because they could not keep up with classes. Even as a child, I knew that with my bookish tendencies and being scrawny and not particularly athletic or interested in manual labor that education was my ticket out of the country. And so it has been in a variety of ironic ways throughout the course of my life. Yet those who picked the strawberries that formed the root of my town’s identity did not themselves really belong to that culture except as a nearly forgotten underclass traveling the circuit of farm labor generation after generation, unable to escape their fate as semi-nomadic peasants. I do not know if my life is more ironic than most of the lives I interact with, or that I am simply sensitive enough to the ironies to remark upon them and muse upon them more than others do, but strawberries represent one of the many ironies of my life.

Nor does the irony stop there. As I have blogged about a few times [2], I suffer from gout. Having good friends who don’t like to see me hobble around, I ended up getting quite a lot of information about dietary concerns. Included in that was a list of fruits that ended up helping with reducing the quantity of uric acid naturally. Top on that list was cherries (another fruit that has ironic personal significance in my life, but one probably unsuitable for public consumption), but next after that comes strawberries, and so I have been trying to eat as many strawberries and strawberry products as possible to help stave off the supply of uric acid in my big toe. It appears that I am unable to escape entanglement with strawberries for the foreseeable future. At least they taste sweet; if one has to be entangled, one wants the experience to be as drama-free and pain-free as possible. One does not always have that option, after all.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/cork-station/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/strawberry-fields-forever/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/gout-and-decrepitude/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/bring-out-your-dead/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/crystal-visions/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/the-errors-are-still-my-own-but-im-working-on-them/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/book-review-all-roads-lead-to-austen/