Papaya Summer

The smell of ripe papayas still takes me back to that summer of 1958, when I was sixteen and thought I knew everything about everything. Grandpa's farm in Iowa seemed like the center of the universe then, though the papaya tree growing near the back fence was more of a mystery than any of us cared to admit.

"That's bull," my brother Tommy had said when I first pointed it out. "Papayas don't grow in Iowa. Probably some weed you're mistaking for something exotic."

But it wasn't a weed. Every morning that July, I found myself running to the fence line before anyone else woke up, watching those green oblong fruits slowly turn yellow in the Midwest sun. Mama finally admitted it—Grandpa had planted seeds from a tropical fruit catalog years ago, just to see if they'd take. Most died in the first frost, but this one survived, sheltered by the old barn.

The day they ripened, Grandpa sat us all down on the porch steps. We were a family that never wasted food, yet here we were with fruit that didn't belong in our climate, our lives, or our understanding of how the world worked. "Sometimes," Grandpa said, "the things that aren't supposed to grow end up teaching us the most."

We ate those papayas while the fireflies danced over the cornfields—sweet, musky, unlike anything I'd ever tasted. Tommy made bull jokes all through supper, but even he went back for seconds.

Now at seventy-four, I grow my own papayas in a greenhouse my husband built before he passed. Sometimes I catch myself running to check them, just like that girl in 1958, and I wonder what Grandpa would think about how that accidental tree became the most enduring legacy of his farm. Not the cattle, not the crops, but the impossible fruit that taught a stubborn family that sometimes the most beautiful things in life are the ones that weren't supposed to happen at all.