Calamansi Juice

Sarah Nadolny

I watched her from inside the greenhouse. Her long, frail fingers worked at the laundry.

Hanging it up to dry with wooden clothes pins, an old fashioned way of doing it but considering

my nanas age I guess it was just fashioned. Her skin was the color of cocoa and so full of

wrinkles that not even a dryer would smooth them out. Her once beautiful brown black hair had

long since run away and shed taken to wearing wigs of the same cut but varying shades of

brown. They all curled beneath her ears, a picture of a time before I was born.

I traced my fingers across the still too green flesh of my papaya. Carefully turning it, I

checked to ensure that my name was still written there by my mother from the week before. Too

often permanent marker wasnt so permanent.

Traversing the greenhouse wasnt easy but it was always worth it. My nana practically

created the term green thumb, capable of making anything grow even during the most

unforgiving of Tucson summers. I said goodbye to the doves who lived in cage the same size as

the greenhouse and wasnt accessible except through the greenhouse itself. I latched the door and

checked the netting and chicken wire for flaws. The greenhouse wasnt made of glass like most

people picture and it would be a shame to lose some or all of the vegetables and herbs because

my nana couldnt see the hole. Not to mention the birds.

Who is that? she called out as I walked up behind her, dried up grass crunched beneath

my feet. Her accent was thick on her tongue and if you didnt already know it was Tagalog,

which sounded like ta-gall-ick, youd never know.

Its me Nana. Sarah, I replied. Shed gone blind due to macular degeneration four years

before and now didnt know who anyone was until they spoke, sometimes not even then. I was

just checking on the papayas. Do you want some help?

 You see my pineapple? was her reply. What she said was actually far different, but that

was what she meant. I grew up listening to her tell long stories, often repeated, and could easily

translate what she was saying in my head without thinking about it. People who didnt

understand, like my husband, I ended up translating for. Translating English to English was

redundant for me, but not translating seemed rude.

Yeah Nana, I saw it. Its growing already huh? I phrased it like a question but it wasnt.

Shed literally cut the top off of a pineapple, planted the thing and it started to grow. I wondered

if she had a garden back in the Philippines and what it looked like. I wondered if she missed it.

From the look of the rest of the yard itd be difficult to believe she was such a

horticulturist. The grass was all dead and crunchy and aside from the calamnsi tree, there wasnt

another plant outside the greenhouse. A portion of the backyard was taken up by a poorly

covered patio with dirty plastic furniture and rusted yard maintenance equipment that was

rendered useless, as so many things were, by the Tucson sun.

She continued to mumble something else but it was too soft to hear, it probably didnt

matter anyway. The wind picked up and began the arduous task of drying the sheets and her

sizeable under garments. It filled the air with the smell of Tide and dead calamasi blossoms. I

pulled the wad of plastic bags from the back pocket of my jeans, separated one, and set about the

task I had originally came to do; relieve the ancient tree of its plump, orange colored fruit in

order to make calamansi juice. It was a major pain in the ass considering the very largest the

calamansi would grow would be the size of a silver dollar, even that was unusual and inside each

little gem was the generous amount of less than an ounce of juice. And you needed several cups

to make it into a beverage that was similar to lemonade. But it was worth it, as long as I didnt

have any open wounds on my hands.

 I filled up two grocery bags of hopefully juicy fruit by the time she noticed what I was

doing.

Take them, take all of them, she said climbing underneath the trees overhang into the

little grotto from which you could actually pick the fruit without aide of a ladder. Every year she

ended up with so much fruit most of it just fell away to rot. Shed harvest several bags worth and

give the fruit away or make more pancit than anyone could possible eat. Besides that, no one but

her old friends took food from her anymore. And if they did, it immediately went in the trash.

Especially after she gave my dad the pizza that was happy to see him, it had her dentures on it, or

since she gave my oldest brother Tim the siopao that had a Brillo pad inside one. Id think she

was just out to kill off our branch of the family but she loves my dad and Tim. She had less

reputable things to say about the other branches of the family tree and there are more than half a

dozen other instances of foreign objects in dishes given to others in family. But she was Filipino

and stubborn, thusly refused to stop cooking.

Ill take a lot of them but I cant take them all Nana. Itd take me over a week to

harvest them all, and its only one tree.

Sure you can. Give them to Matt and Jan and the baby. She filled up another bag of

perfectly ripe fruit and I questioned how she could tell the ripe ones from the green ones. Maybe

the green ones were harder.

Xanders too young for citrus still, I replied remembering something Jan had said about

it messing with the digestive tracts at that age and I was not about to start changing the resulting

diapers. We continued to work in silence for a few minutes till I felt a sharp pain on my arm. I

lifted it up to see a bee crawling across my skin, desperately trying to get free from where its
stinger was lodged in my flesh. I brushed him off and watched him fall to his death, all to cause

me a minor annoyance. It kind of made me sad.

Ow, ow, ow, ow, I repeat rubbing at the small welt forming on my arm like it would

help any.

What?

I got stung by a bee, my voice came out winey as I continued to rub my arm.

Just one? Ooh you whine like a baby.

Hey, it hurt, I said again.

When I was a girl, not even eleven and a half the Japanese were coming down the street.

I saw them and shoved my sister Delia into the bush and I jumped in after her. But the bush was

pull of bees. I clamp my hand over her mouth. Keep her from screaming, so the soldiers

wouldnt find us. The bees, they stung us like this and this, till we were so swollen up that we

looked like this, she said making little starburst motions with her hands across her arms and

ended by puffing out her cheeks and pressing her arms out till she looked bloated.

She put her arms down, relaxed her cheeks and started laughing uncontrollably. Id never

been so happy she was blind before so she couldnt see the look on my face. Finally, I forced

myself to laugh with her. If she could laugh in the face of sugar coated childhood trauma then so

could I.

Nana, youre terrible, I said ending my forced laughter.

You a brat. But you a good girl.

We fell into a sort of comfortable silence. As comfortable as I could be hearing stories of

her life as she grew up during World War 2. I couldnt stop the images from forming in my head.

I didnt want to.

 Call it sick fascination for the horrific and the gruesome but a pleasant walk through the

park on a summer afternoon didnt make for a good story. Not unless an army of ninjas, or

werewolves, or ninja-werewolves jumped out of the duck pond.