Title: Fruit Finds
Setting: A room at the top of a hill, off of a dusty path, surrounded by a lush, tangled jungle.
Characters: Small girl, a bedridden Uncle, and a handful of roosters & hens.
Brief: A girl and her great uncle share treats and family gossip.
Sitting on the bed, the roosters trying to come in through the open door, the both of us shooing them away, we eat a mint and laugh. I still barely spoke Spanish, but understood a lot of what was said thanks to the English subtitles appearing at the bottom of the grainy telenovela that played in neverending loops on the small television that sat upon a stack of items that created a makeshift TV table. After school began, each weekend, during our mint and telenovela catch-ups, I would be able to pick up more and more of his stories about our family: "You know, that's not water your uncle Marcelo is drinking back there," he would tell me with a belly laugh. "Mhmmmm!" I would respond wide-eyed, indulging the gossip while chomping and sucking on my mint.
Other times, he would fill me in on the drama of the telenovela he was watching or the fruit that was in season in the forest, describing it in full detail as to provide me a small scavenger hunt. In hindsight, perhaps also to deter me from accidentally eating anything that resembled fruit and was in fact, inedible. "But don't touch your uncle's orange tree," he would warn laughing as I hopped off the bed.
Up the road, Tio Marcelo had a small garden to the far left of his house where a tangled orange tree pumped out bright orange spheres despite invasive vines covering the majority of the canopy. The tree looked abandoned, yet perhaps due to Tio Marcelo's hyper fixation on this orange tree, it still produced oranges that burst like liquid sunshine with one bite, still warm from dangling in the afternoon sun. No one from the family bothered to ask about the tending of such a mangled fruit tree, but what a compliment to be gifted a single sphere when Tio Marcelo felt so inclined.
As such, steering clear of Tio Marcelo's garden, I would take off to the jungle that was more tangled than the orange tree in a maze-like search for fruit finds like bananas, acerola, grapefruit, or my favorite, guava. Each time a fruit was found, I would treasure it like Tio Marcelo and his oranges and bring it back to my great uncle sitting in his small room without a door. The sound of the antennae-powered telenovela singing to the rooster and chickens was a non-verbal welcome to enter.
Pushing aside the curtain that hung in place of a door, I hold out the fruit just to see his face light up. With a wide smile, he took the fruit into one of his hands while reaching back to the disorganized array of tools next to his bed with the other. A pairing knife was swiftly at the ready while I climbed back onto the bed to take a seat next to him. Together, we'd split the fruit find and I would continue listening to his stories while the roosters continued pacing in and out to watch the telenovela.
As my Spanish improved, I would walk down the dusty hill to recruit kids to buy candy from my bedridden uncle. It didn't matter that the kids couldn't make out the grammar of my sentence. Once I said, "dulce—vengan," the message was clear. "Tienes centavos?" I would ask, arms crossed as they approached the entrance, making sure they understood that the candy was not free.
Once back to school stateside, taking in the wide, terracotta tiled halls of my new school in the center of Denver, I browse the bulletin boards pinned with a blanket of posters. It was the late nineties, so bulletin boards with posters was one of the primary resources for finding information about happenings around school. As my eyes scan the disarray of paper and fonts, eyes stop on a poster announcing a drawing contest. Without question, I knew which scene to replicate.
After seeing the poster for the contest, I spent three days with my crayons sprayed across the kitchen table after school scribbling and sketching the scene where my uncle sold candy from his small room. I drew the roosters passing through the entry way, the banana plants providing shade along the dusty path, and the speckled light making an array of shapes that filtered like kaleidoscope glitter across the facade of the building. I'm not sure when my bedridden uncle passed as no one told me, but the drawing won third place. Maybe, sometimes, angels work in magical ways!