Most of what I remember about growing up has to do with the bullying I endured from my brother.
However, a couple of weeks ago I remember telling my son that I had the 'best' childhood because I was able to pick fruit.
Plucking fruit was such a childhood joy. When I was around five or six, I remember taking an unripe apple from the apple tree in our apartment complex. Even if it wasn't edible, it was so exciting!
Growing up I was able to gather lemonsitos and cacao from my aunt's yard. We never threw away the cacao seeds because these were washed, dried, and made into 'tablia' or cocoa.
My favorite past time in grade three was climbing the 'Mansanitas' tree. Children and locals also called the indigenous fruit 'cherries' because they were small, round and red. When you bit into it, it had a delicious sweet liquid. I stopped climbing the soft branches when I fell and almost broke my jaw.
I harvested 'balimbing' or star fruit from another aunt. Relished the 'tambis' or curacao from a neighbor's tree. Felt naughty when I climbed the chico tree at school to stash away the brown fruit till they became ripe.
In one of our houses, we had papaya and pineapple and in another, there was a huge tree which bore the milky 'star apple' abundantly. At the back was a 'guyabano' tree whose fruit I also tasted. Then there were the mangoes of course. All kinds. The hairy, juicy, and sweet variety. The carabao. Eaten ripe and sweet or still unripe, sour, and crunchy.
I remember harvesting bananas - the type you boil and the type you just eat straight from the bunch. And there were the odd fruit like the 'snake fruit' which grew on wild vines, had a green hairy exterior, and inside, a round yellow fruit. When you opened this fruit, there were seeds encased in a white pulp which you sucked. I didn't like it much but the lore of the fruit more than made up for it. Supposedly, snakes ate the fruit so it was almost an adventure to sieve through vines to look for them. Another odd source of joy - sucking nectar from a bunch of Santan flowers.
And oh, the guavas! Small and hard. Larger with softer white flesh. But my favorite was the variety in my uncle's backyard. Pink, juicy, and so fragrant. I used to spend some afternoons high up in the branches, munching on the delicious fruit while gazing at the blue sky. The sound of the afternoon breeze would take me somewhere far away. Once, I made guava jelly from the fruit. The tree had so much fruit it was falling all over the place!
One of my best memories was spending the summer with my cousins. In front of their house is a deep, wide, blue river. Behind their house, a vast array of rice fields, and beyond the rice fields, hills full of wild 'lumboy' or java plum trees - free for anyone. One afternoon, we hiked up the hills with nothing but a liter of water. When we got to the top (after some adventures), we were so excited to see the lumboy trees full of the dark purple fruit. We each took turns climbing up and throwing down the fruit with glee and trying to find the largest one each time. 'Look at this one! It's huge!" Then there would be another bigger one, of course.
Inside the lumboy fruit is a seed. With no one around to see us, we had a contest on who could spit the seed the farthest and who had the darkest tongue from the stain of lumboy skin. Afterwards, when we had our fill, we sat down and watched the sun sink lower and the sky turn a pale pink with streaks of orange. We saw hills, trees, a hint of the meandering river. And when I recall, it almost seemed like I could even see far into the future.
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