The Summer of the Papaya Bull

Margaret stood in her daughter's kitchen, the ripe papaya heavy in her weathered hands. Its yellow skin mottled with orange, it carried her back sixty years to the summer she'd met Eleanor — her dearest friend, the one who'd taught her that courage wears many disguises.

"You know," Eleanor had said, leaning against the fence of her family's small farm in rural Georgia, "my daddy says Old Bessie's the gentlest creature God ever put on this earth. Says that bull wouldn't hurt a fly." She'd laughed, the sound like wind chimes. "But I've seen her chase three grown men up the pecan tree just for stepping in her shadow."

Margaret had been seventeen, newly arrived from upstate New York, all elbows and uncertainty. Eleanor, with her sun-bleached hair and bare feet, had seemed like something entirely foreign — like the papayas her mother imported from the grocer, exotic and sweet and nothing like the apples Margaret had grown up with.

That summer, they'd sat on the back porch while Eleanor's mother sliced fresh papaya for them, its flesh the color of sunset, its black seeds scattered like constellations. They'd talked about boys and dreams and the futures they imagined for themselves. Margaret wanted to be a teacher. Eleanor wanted to see the ocean.

"Life's short, Margie," Eleanor had said, sucking papaya juice from her thumb. "Don't let fear be the bull that keeps you fenced in."

Now, at seventy-eight, Margaret understood what Eleanor had meant. The bull wasn't Old Bessie, who'd indeed chased Margaret up that pecan tree two weeks later (Eleanor had laughed so hard she'd fallen off the porch rail). The bull was every "I can't" and "what if" and "not yet" that had tried to contain her over the decades.

She'd taught for thirty-five years. Eleanor had moved to California and seen the Pacific, sending papayas in care packages until her death three years ago. Some friendships, Margaret had learned, aren't measured by time or proximity but by the way they change you — by the way a friend's voice echoes in your head when you need courage most.

Margaret sliced the papaya, its juice running over her arthritic knuckles like sweet memory. Somewhere, she knew, Eleanor was laughing at how thoroughly she'd avoided getting fenced in, how fully she'd lived. And that, she decided, was the truest legacy a friend could leave: not the papayas or the laughter or even the stories, but the courage to keep growing, right up until the end.