I was walking down the hill - it had just rained hours, minutes, seconds before. The air was heavy with the scent, my hair beginning to frizz in the dampness as the sun plummeted behind me. It was cold, and I was walking. Up and down, down and up over hills, past the homeless man at the corner, past the boy in my 6th grade class with the red backpack, past the junior in my Spanish Class who swims with one of my best friends. And suddenly I stopped.

Looking back, it wasn't anything really special, nothing halt-worthy. Rather, it was the fact that something so normal, so quaint could exist here of all places that stopped my feet.

“It” was a simple one story house with ivy climbing a fence, a bright orange rosebush (which shouldn't have been too surprising in a suburb where roses can be found in every garden), and strawberries. In a wooden bucket, there was a strawberry plant, with the vines delicately hanging of the edge, the fruit (or perhaps vegetable) slowly ripening, the shades from rosy red to pale green.

They grow strawberries...

Because now they were almost certainly a "they". Perhaps “they” were an elderly white couple, because there was no possibility of a pair of Asians that would grow strawberries, or live in a house with vines crawling up a fence. No, Asians definitely lived in the Greek-influenced mini-palace next door, minivan parked on the curved driveway. And in the secluded estate with its not-so-hidden pool that shone in its unnatural blueness, yes this was more up our alley, the need to state our wealth to be judged by our peers. But this pair, with their quaint cottage, their bright orange roses, their strawberries, their ivy, and was that the arm of a marble statue underneath the shrubbery ... this pair was almost definitely white.

In that instant, in that moment of time, my mind wandered. I scrolled through universes of what ifs: what if they opened their door now and saw me looking, what if it started pouring, and they let me take shelter under their brown roof, what if they had cookies, what if we became friends. All of these what ifs, inspired by the countless pieces of fiction, and my recent forage into the world of the elderly became a reality for a moment. For a single second of time, it was all real - the couple was going to open their door and I would have a new friend.

And then I took a step forward, and all thoughts of friends, elderly or otherwise dissipated into the mist. I took one more look at the strawberries, the roses and the house and turned forward, walking back into the reality of frizzy hair and mansions, of rain and sunsets. One without a basket of strawberries on the front lawn.