Biting into a nectarine, I pull out its knobbled stone, and with juice running down my chin I pass my daughter the flesh to eat.
I think of Dad, ripping the dimpled peel of an orange off with his incisors, just to make me and my brothers wince at the thought of that bitter skin.
Thwoh! Peel dropping, as he spat the pith onto the plate.
From the bite marked hole he would then tear the orange open with his hands, ripping into its segments to hand us juicy chunks.
Then once, when I was home from school because I was sick, I lay in the darkened living room, thick blanket up to my neck watching Sesame Street in the middle of the day. Big Bird and the little American kids were sitting on the front stoop of a house on the set and it must have been ‘O’ for orange that day because they were eating oranges, in delicious cross-section slices of the fruit. Each time they came to eat a piece, they would carefully tear and pull the peel away in a perfect circle.
I called my Dad in to show him what they were doing, and he went away and came back with an orange for me, cut up into these perfect rounds, just like that. I smiled and pulled each piece of peel away, to bite the fruit.
Not all moments of childhood, mine or E’s I think, are like being passed that circle of orange. They are not all close up faces, soapy bubbles blown into the sky, and the feeling of holding your Dad’s hand as you learn to walk.
Sometimes, I am impatient, sometimes I cannot stand to wait for one moment longer on the front step, with the shopping, and the buggy to fold, and I need a wee and a glass of water and to call someone back. Sometimes, I cannot bear to wait for E to take her time climbing the stairs one by one in between pausing to think and pick up some tiny bit of fluff from the carpet.
Sometimes, all I want to do is close my eyes, or drink my tea or ring my friend, and no I do not want to play trains again.
But some afternoons we are in the garden, staring at the sandpit and wondering what to do, I suddenly remember being at the beach in Cornwall with my brothers and how we would take it turns to cover my Dad in sand. I bury my feet under the sand, she stares at the mound at the end of my legs and then I wriggle my sandy toes free. Then she calls for “More, more”, and we begin the whole thing all over again.
postcards to my sister 