The Papaya Lightning Summer

I still remember that summer of 1962 when Grandfather's bull old Bessie got her name, though nobody quite knows why we called a bull Bessie in the first place. That was the year the papaya tree in the backyard finally decided to fruit, three years after Father planted it as a sapling he'd brought back from the war.

We were sitting on the porch that August evening, Grandfather in his rocking chair with his pipe, Mother shelling peas for supper. The sky had been turning that peculiar purple-green color that comes before summer storms in the valley. I was twelve, old enough to notice the way Grandfather's hands shook but not old enough to understand what it meant.

"There's lightning coming," he said suddenly, pointing his pipe stem toward the western hills. "I can feel it in my knees. Same way your grandmother could predict rain in her elbows."

Sure enough, the first crack of lightning split the sky just as the bull let out a bellow from the lower pasture. He'd somehow gotten through the fence again—third time that week. Grandfather sighed, set down his pipe, and grabbed his walking stick. "Come on, boy. Let's go get that foolish creature before he decides to visit the neighbors' vegetable patch again."

We walked down through the lower pasture in that strange stillness that comes before storms really break. The air felt thick enough to chew. When we found Bessie, she was standing by the papaya tree, which was drooping with four ripe fruits that had somehow survived the wind. The bull was nosing at them with gentle curiosity, as if she'd never seen anything so peculiar in all her bovine life.

"She knows,'' Grandfather said softly. "Animals sense what's coming. Maybe better than we do."

That night, as lightning illuminated the farmhouse kitchen in regular intervals like some cosmic photographer's flash, we sat around the table eating sliced papaya for the first time. None of us had ever tasted it before—sweet and musky, with seeds that looked like little black pearls. Mother said it tasted like sunshine and distance all at once.

Grandfather died two winters later, but every summer since, when lightning storms roll across the valley and the papaya fruits ripen on the tree that still grows in that spot, I think of him. I think of how wisdom comes in unexpected moments—sometimes with a bull in a pasture, sometimes with a strange new fruit, sometimes in the flash of lightning that briefly makes everything clear.

My granddaughter asked me just yesterday why I still plant papaya every spring, even though the winters here are barely mild enough for them. I told her it's because some things are worth growing even when the conditions aren't perfect. Some things need a little stubborn faith—and maybe a touch of lightning—to truly flourish.