Jen Hallaman
The first weekend in February, you devour an entire grapefruit. It’s the first time you’ve devoured any solid food. Supremed, bursting at the seams with pink juice, grapefruit is your first delicacy.
The day after you discover grapefruit, I listen to an NPR segment about citrus greening, a bacterial infection that has attacked citrus trees all across Florida, mottling their fruits, leaving them misshapen and salty.
I ate a grapefruit a day when I was pregnant with you. I have never been good at sleeping, but my insomnia was especially relentless during pregnancy. At night, I’d fall asleep for two or three hours only to wake during the witching hour. Unable to drift off again, I’d read novels or write poems until my eyes forced themselves shut. When I woke, better-rested but groggy, the tartness of my late-morning grapefruit rehydrated and revived me, marking the close of another long night, bringing me one day closer to your arrival.
When I was pregnant, I had an app that tracked your growth by comparing your size to that of a new fruit each week. I checked the app religiously each Wednesday. The week that you were the same size as a grapefruit, your dad and I traveled to the Sonoran desert. We ate vegan food laden with chili peppers and hiked in the shade of saguaros that rose fifty feet in the sky.
Three years before you were born, we traveled to another desert, the Chihuahuan. While visiting a famous cave, we learned that this desert used to be the floor of a long-lost ocean. We toured the cave, ate peanut butter sandwiches in the cafeteria, and then departed for our next destination, an ethereal field of white gypsum that promised to shimmer with the purple and pink and orange of the sky come dusk. As your dad drove, I watched out the window, imagining a time when this otherworldly landscape was submerged in saltwater: spiny shrubs glowing neon like coral, fish with reptilian characteristics scurrying by. The desert was an ocean 250 million years ago. I wondered how long it took for an entire ocean to dry up.
On the way to the field of white gypsum, we stopped to hike along the Rio Grande. Where there once was water, we found only a dry riverbed. We climbed to the bottom of the riverbed and touched the parched sediment, let it pool up in the crevices of our palms. I was struck by the memory of working in the anthropology lab in college: the brittleness of old bone; the unlikelihood that something so porous and hollow had once supported the weight of a body.
Standing in the riverbed, your dad and I were quiet. Dead air echoed with the pulse of bygone currents.
For a while after that trip, your dad and I talked about moving out west, living amidst the desert’s bleak beauty. But the image of the dry riverbed stuck with us. Cushioned by east coast humidity, we tracked news of wildfires ambushing campsites where we’d slept, severe drought devastating the water reserves of mountain towns through which we’d wandered. Eventually, we gave up on the desert and moved to Ohio. We moved to be near your aunt and grandmother, but also for the hope of a less-unstable climate. For the promise of fresh water.
I feed you grapefruit as often as I can. Food prices are rising steadily, but citrus is still cheap in the winter. Someday, citrus greening will make this sweet-and-tart fruit a rarity, along with lemons and limes and tangerines. Orange juice will be spectacularly expensive, a commonplace item on breakfast tables past.
In the book I’m reading, things of beauty keep disappearing. But in the book, memories of photographs and roses and emeralds evacuate along with the objects themselves. One day, all of the fruit falls from the trees, a sign that it will soon be forgotten. The book doesn’t specify what flavor of fruit, but as I read, I picture dying groves painted with sun-colored citrus, pushing back against the slate sky before its screaming hues are smothered by a blanket of fresh snow.
I wonder if you’ll remember the peculiar taste of grapefruit when it’s gone: bright and tart, a little sweet, like a soprano singing a capella. I wonder if the seas we know will become deserts, and what will become of deserts that were once the bottom of a sea. I wonder if you’ll want to know the names of beautiful things we’ve lost, or if it will be simpler to adapt by choosing to forget your favorite fruit.
Perhaps I should try and protect your future self by refusing to indulge your love for a thing that will soon be dead. But I want you to remain familiar with delicacy. I want you to recognize things of beauty when you encounter them, even in a world as alien and arid as the undying desert.
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Jen Hallaman lives in Cleveland with her husband, baby daughter, and two twenty-pound(!) cats. She works at a local independent bookstore, where she spends her lunch break writing poems. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Little Patuxent Review, Grub Street, The Shore, Roanoke Review, and others. Find her at www.jenhallaman.com.