When I saw my great-grandmother peel a tangerine with her bare hands
while men used knives for oranges, she became God.
I imagined what she could do with the sun.
—JP Infante, “Poetry No. 51”
Mistral’s memories of her hometown are few and thin now, threadbare and tattered like a well-worn (and well-loved) garment. In those days she was sealed away from the sorrows of the world, oblivious to the muted grief in the faces of parents who knew—long before she did—that their time together would be too short.
She remembers her mother’s exaggerated reminiscing and her father teaching her the names of winds. She can remember sprinting through narrow, sunlit rows, imagining herself a gale or brandishing a stick sword. She can just remember what it was like to have had no real revelations, to have no concrete opinions on anything of consequence.
The memory that defines her time there happened on a typical still afternoon. The oppressive summer heat had a way of sapping her energy for play. Instead, she would climb the stairs to her grandmother’s room.
Amisna’s stories weren’t as hammy as Ninieve’s, but their delivery was no less fascinating to Mistral. Her mother had had great adventures all over the world, but her grandmother made the mundane magical. (The clandestine sweets didn’t hurt, either.)
Tangerines grew in groves beyond the village byways. They were a fixture of life there—every household had a few. Mistral’s was no exception. She had eaten hundreds of them throughout the course of her childhood, their sweetness always worth the sticky fingers and the occasional toothache. Her parents would quarter them with glinting knives, then lay them in her small, eager hands once the requisite pleasantries were out of the way.
This afternoon, Amisna needed no knife for the bribery. This afternoon, she sank her thumbnail into a tangerine’s navel and peeled it with her hands alone. For Mistral, it was an epiphany.
It would take years of examining for her to truly understand why. On that day it meant she could have as many tangerines as she wanted. When she was ten it meant no longer having to ask for them. When she was fifteen it meant independence. When she was twenty it meant self-sufficiency. When she was thirty it meant that there was always some other way to get something done.
Now that her hands look like her grandmother’s did that day, it means love.
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