Blessing of the seedless orange..

 

"You is a customer" the woman I call Aunty tells me as she puts the four oranges wrapped in the string netting in my hand. 'Tek dis for $400 .. is $500 but you give me 4" and I take it as she then continues the weekly check in on health and wellness which is why I don't really worry about the price of oranges or anything else which she sells because is a nice connection to talk about random things. She sells two sometimes three varieties of limes - seedless, rampoor, long - but I don't need any because I have juice left over from last week's exchange.

I am nervous about buying the oranges as I can't tell if they are  nice or not.

I have had dry ones when I thought the skin showed that they might be nice and juicy, and had nice and juicy ones when I was worried that the they would not because skin rough and so.

Can never tell until you cut really as it is with the other thing I took on thinking I was okay for it and then realised as I got deeper into it that I was not okay for it and so having to quit and deal with that properly.. same thing with passion fruit and pineapple and so..  only when you cut then you know..

I look at price of the orange and wonder how people could sell orange juice given the price - I don't like squeezing orange because I think it is a waste of the pulp left behind. I like buying other kinds of juice and I see that the place where I used to buy juice before the sweetness became a problem has the bench back again and I think I could sit and ask for juice in a glass and stuff on a plate so as to save on the plastic but there are two men sitting on the bench. Two Chinese men. And a woman asks after they leave what I think I wanted to ask and others wanted to know - 'do they come often.. I aint expect to see Chinese like Guyanese food' and the man says yes.. they like bake and saltfish and then I remember I think the same two men at Sunny and Sweet on the East Coast eating roti and baigan choka and I wonder if the Global nations change and Guyanese will go to China and open up cook shops like how we have Chinese restaurants everywhere. 

The cook shop also has Spanish speaking customers and servers and so it is like this interesting space of Spanish, Chinese and the rest of us.

So the mind wanders, random thoughts and then go down to do the yoga routine and it is slower because like every stretch and breath increases the pace of the negative things for the past week. And so I say wait wait.. focus back on the positive.. think of the nice encounter with the woman selling the oranges and other nice people. 

So eventually I finish and move on to treat my body to other things like one of the oranges. I pick up , put my finger nail on the skin to get the fragrance. Slight orange fragrance. I had got some orange oil from the place where I get the freshly ground peanut butter without sugar. There is a niceness about the scent from the skin and I wonder about what to do with it like I wonder about the limes as well which I get and when I wish I could hold on to the scent and realise that citrus gives us both flavour and scent and we can hold on to neither.

Cut the orange, and nice colour. Put into pieces so I could eat slowly. Realise no seeds and there is a slight fear up my spine about the seedless orange wondering whether it is fake like how I used to wonder about the seedless limes. I had seedless oranges 30 years or so ago in another place in another lifetime when the future was ahead but now the future is behind and there is only the present.. and being in the present.

So I eat the orange, sweet, nice juicy.  Thinking that it would be nice to write about something nice as an exercise in a time when people have asked about things to keep writing about, and for which no new words exists really . child abuse, gender based violence, unmet expectations , the resistance to transformative healing in this place .

So the joy of the scent of the orange and the taste and so on my mind and the picture of it.

Something to write about.