Wild Guavas

Wild Guavas

Along the abandoned railroad tracks where the palmetto had been cleared away and not yet reclaimed its domain, its scrub country birthright, we came to gather wild guavas. My brother and I brought buckets and bags and a twenty-two to plink at the empty cans we found. We always found cans, mostly beer but sometimes soda. Either works for target practice.

But the guavas, that's why we came: sweet and tart, full of worms but free and the worms didn't matter once they were cooked down with plenty of sugar. I know about the guava jelly and the paste found at stores or those roadside stands for the tourists but there's nothing better than homemade guava preserves topping a bowl of vanilla ice cream. That's how Florida tasted to me.

We gathered as many as we could find, as many as we could carry home; there Mom took charge and filled the house with their aroma, simmering in the big dented stock pot and even outdoors we'd catch that perfume sifting through the open jalousie windows.

It's been too many years since I picked a wild guava, a long time since I was a boy with a bag and a rifle and an eye out for snakes and I don't know if they grow there anymore.

But they did; they did, back then.

Stephen Brooke ©2009

used in Retellings, 2013