Grapefruit
Every childhood of my summer that I can remember was spent on the farm, a 60 acre coffee plantation, high in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. I have many memories of coming home on the last day before summer or winter break and having only a few scant hours to pack my clothes and some choice possessions into my father’s truck so that we can leave for the mountains as soon as possible.
The farm itself, colloquially named “Coolie Barracks” long before it came into my fathers’ possession, was an hours’ drive from the city of
I remember that most mornings I would walk down from the main house toward the large, perfectly flat open field that my parents parked the trucks. The reason that the field was so perfectly flat, not to mention rectangular was that it used to be, long age, the site of the original main house for the plantation. All that remained of it now though was a massive two story stone chimney that stood obelisk like at the end of the field. On the opposite side of the field was a park bench sitting under a fir tree, and beside that was the reason I would usually walk down there so early in the morning, a grapefruit tree.
The grapefruit for breakfast is a simple concept once you wrap your head around the idea that in my childish mind it pretty much amounted to nothing more than a delivery device for copious amounts of brown sugar (to this day I find the American concept of white sugar odd). That’s how I would eat it, cut in halves and covered in brown sugar. It was very sweet, but with a slight bitterness.
While I ate in the kitchen, my legs dangling from the stool, my mother baked. She baked pies, cakes, cookies, macaroons, and other assorted treats. The house was always full of the smell of baked goods. I never understood until much later in life why she only baked here, in the mountains and never at home in the city.
My father, when not overseeing the workers on the farm or tending to his many dogs that he professionally bred and trained would usually sit out on the front porch, listening to the radio. He always listened to the same thing without fail as long as I could remember: political talk radio. He would sit there for hours at a time, leaning back in his chair, usually with Thunder, the one dog smart enough to be considered a house dog, lying loyally at his feet. “Morning,” he would say to me every day, his single word statement managing to be both greeting and question.
“Good morning,” I would reply back. Very few other words passed between us.
Words were not common here. My mother baked, my father tended to his livelihood and his dogs, while I was left to my own amusements. We each seemed to exist in our own worlds, living under the same roof, but not quite together.
Later in life, after high school, my parents separated. My mother made the decision to leave
i wish I could say that I was surprised, but I had always known that was the way it was going to end. Those days spent in the mountains are happy memories to me, and have given me what I believe to be an appreciation of silence and serenity. Unfortunately those memories are also tinged with feelings of loneliness, and the knowledge that I saw my parents drift apart, barely speaking to one another, and distracting themselves with what they had at hand. I guess my memories of the farm overall good, sweet, sugary, but beneath that they are bitter.
