Issue #19 - Two Trees

A gem of a fiction piece today

Note from Editor

Dear Reader,

Good morning! Does anyone else feel like it’s been a really long week? Except, it’s just Wednesday. I chose Wednesday as the day We Have Food comes out very carefully because I wanted it to be something I looked forward to in the middle of the week. I hope it provides a weekly dose of joy for you too—feeds a particular hunger if you will. Today, I have a fiction piece for you. You may have noticed we don’t get a lot of fictional stories in this newsletter so I had to jump at the opportunity to publish it. It is a very lyrical piece by Busayo and I hope you can feel the poetry in her words. “Fruit that I will eat well this time. No matter its abundance. I will finish the ripe, white insides. Sprinkle the seed in a place where they will be sure to sprout. Not rot.” So vivid and vast.

Before you get to the piece though, another note - I only have a month of posts left in my queue. So if you or a loved one want to write a story, poem, essay etc. on food and your relationship with it, please submit to this google form. I am a one person operation running this and I love reading through what makes food feel at home for different writers. This is not to say that We Have Food will stop after a month—believe me I can talk about food forever. I’m just saying that I don’t want to do all the talking. And there’s only so much you want to hear about my idea of pairing snacks with specific TV shows (yes, that is a real piece I plan to publish).

As I think about what awaits us in the next chapter of our adventure, I hope you keep me in your thoughts too—and share your food stories with me.

Thank you for reading as always!

Padya

Busayo Akinmoju

Busayo is a writer and a doctor. Her work has appeared in Lucent Dreaming, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Kalahari Review, among others. She likes to read, and to relax on long walks.

Two Trees

There are two trees that have happened in this compound, this square of land surrounding the house. 

Two proper trees. Not just the belly-soft plantain trees clustered together in a grove, bearing a bunch every other month. Proper trees are the ones with real wooden branches, leaves only a palm-of-my-hand wide, and bearing recognisable fruit for snacking on, not components of an actual food group the way plantains are.  

Just fruit, sweet and almost meaningless in their bright, sugary taste. 

I say meaningless because of how fruit happen to come about (fruit from proper trees). They grow out from a nub on a random branch, bud into a flower and get pollinated. Then harden, then swell into a fully-formed green mango. The gentle smell weaving across the tree’s foliage when the wind passes by on a cool evening. What is the point of all of that song and dance, I ask myself when I bite into the mango’s yellow belly. 

A tree grows for years, sprouts leaves, then fruit. And then I eat only half of it, get bored and throw the rest on the ground. To be raided by a passing goat, by flies, or even just left to rot, forgotten. All of that growing for years, and not all of the fruit a tree produces is appreciated by gentle, contemplative chewing. Or by a patient hand, waiting to pluck the first of the tree’s offering. 

And the fruit that do get love, are only encasings for a seed. After all of the soft belly of that mango, the hard seed is what continues the hard, sugary (meaningless) existence of the crop. Seed. Sapling. Fruit tree. Fruit. Me, forgetting to eat all of it again. 

It is probably why when the first tree that happened in this compound was moved to make way for an extension of the house, it was only half-sad. I thought about the days spent climbing the tree as a young thing. I thought about the bees in the tree’s hair that we got rid of with a fire licking the end of a raised pole. I thought about the spiky branches of the tree. Its smell on the wind. 

(And, maybe it is interesting that I didn’t think about its fruit) 

The second tree, I waited for it to produce fruit. And it did. Two in the first year. And now it is the second year. The tree has all of these yellow flowers, with their sticky pollen. So many, many flowers without the smell of anything when the wind passes by in the evening. Already May, and I am waiting for fruit. Looking around the branches, and trying to decide if a small green nub is another flower. Or fruit. 

Fruit that I will eat well this time. No matter its abundance. I will finish the ripe, white insides. Sprinkle the seed in a place where they will be sure to sprout. Not rot. 

And in all of this waiting, the cluster of plantain trees never failed. A new bunch each month. Steady, proper food. 

But it is still the sugary, ripe taste of meaningless fruit I want. Is that giving a meaning to the tree after all? 

Well, if you ask the people who live in the house the compound is attached to, they might have varying answers.

The aunt doesn’t like fruit, doesn’t eat them even though the doctor told her it’s okay despite the fact that she has diabetes.

The two children, three and five, are too young to pluck the fruit themselves. And too absent minded to pick the fallen ones from the ground before a goat does. 

The father doesn’t come home often enough to think about the fruit – whether they are meaningful or not. Two weekends a month is all the mother gets of him – the left overs his other family are willing to allow her.

But she, the mother, eats the fruit contemplatively, even on the days that I do not. Before the mango tree was moved, she peeled the ripe green skins, and never littered them. She placed them on a tray in the evenings while she chewed on the yellow insides. 

She shared one of the two fruits with me that grew last year. Oranges. It is an orange tree we have been waiting for to sprout new fruit – even though they produce all year round, unlike mangoes that reach their abundance in April. And begin to rot by the basket in markets where they are sold. 

It is very like fruit to be unpredictable in that way, remember, they are unnecessary. Sweet, comforting, without meaning.

One evening, I sat with the mother outside. We were still waiting for the orange tree, but she pointed with her chin at the plantains trees.

“Do you see that? By next week if we pluck them we can make dodo.”

And I thought about the sureness she had. The plantain trees would be there next week, with mature produce. Without any of the noise of bright flowers. With no smell flowing in the evening breeze. But they would be there. Sure. 

The orange tree sat quietly in the compound, and I wondered if one day, it would mean more than the promise of its sugary taste. And be there for the mother, giving her hope.