The Papaya Guardian

From my bedroom window, I've become quite the spy. Not the kind in those old movies Arthur and I watched on Saturday nights, but the gentle sort—watching Lily's morning ritual through the kitchen window. She's seventeen now, her dark hair swept up in that messy bun she thinks I can't see from here.

The papaya tree outside, the one Arthur planted the year we bought this house in 1972, reaches toward her window like an old friend offering fruit. Its leaves dance in the morning breeze, just as they did when our Sarah was Lily's age, sitting at this same table, hair wild, reading encyclopedias.

Some mornings I catch Lily plucking a ripe papaya, just like her mother did. I think she knows I'm watching. There's comfort in these small inheritances—the fruit, the hair she pulls back when she's thinking hard, the stubbornness that runs through our women like an underground river.

"Bull-headed," my father used to call me. I catch the same set in Lily's jaw when she's working through some problem she won't ask help with. Good thing, too. The world needs women who don't yield easily.

Arthur's been gone seven years now, but this house, this tree, this girl—she's the papaya guardian now, though she doesn't know it. Someday she'll stand at her own window, spying on someone she loves, understanding what I've learned: that love is mostly witnessing. The papaya will fruit for her children, and the stubbornness will serve them well, and somehow, impossibly, the hair will gray and the circle will complete itself again.

I saw her look up just now, toward my window. She smiled. The spy has been spotted, but that's all right. Some secrets are meant to be shared.