Fruit

The flats of strawberries on offer now from solitary vendors standing on street corners on and near campus are somehow not appealing in the least. Not like the sliced fruit dripping juices wrist to elbow at the fruit stands in the square in Mexico City that spring—papaya, mango, melon, what?—dipped in lime juice and chili powder, said to be unsafe to eat and so much more desirable for that. Safer were greenish glass bottles of CocaCola at the Mercado, and a soup made from succulent pink shrimp and cilantro eaten with handshaped corn tortillas. The wondrous market offered everything from slabs of beef dizzy with flies to fragile butterflies in silver filagree, from onyx chess pieces to cotton dresses embroidered with every color thread, the light material kind to sunburned arms and shins. My first trip to a foreign place—what made me never want to do without again.

image: Mangga gedong gincu, a cultivar of mango, Mangifera indica, from Tomo, Sumedang, West Java, Indonesia, W.A. Djatmiko