FAMILY ALBUM: grapefruit LISA NASH

In my parents’ yard there is a grapefruit tree. It grows by the southeast corner of the house. It’s huge, and obscenely generous. Every December it bears hundreds of grapefruit, maybe even a thousand, round and globe-like.

The tree appeared on its own one year when I was in middle school. Mom thought maybe one of us had spit out a seed while wandering through the yard. We guessed it was citrus, but we didn’t know. I hoped it was an orange tree. It finally bloomed when I was in high school, pushing out tiny green fruits at first, the right color, but too round to be limes. They grew and grew and lightened bit by bit. Finally in the fall, we could tell that they were grapefruit. The first taste that Christmas confirmed it.

There were a few fruits that first year, then more, and more, and more. Now my parents bear up under the weight of almost a thousand grapefruits a season. If they meet anyone new in the weeks between Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl, the first question on their lips is always heartbreakingly hopeful: Do you like grapefruit?

Whether you would see a yearly gift of a thousand grapefruit as a blessing or a curse depends on your views of grapefruit, I suppose. In my decade as a grapefruit pusher I have discovered that opinions run extreme when it comes to grapefruit: you either hate it, or you love it.


Caption: Thanksgiving, late 1940s. New York? Gramma is second from the right.

Blessings and curses arrive together all the time. When I was young it seemed like it was the sadness that came to chase the happiness down and ruin something good, like when my grandmother, the one grandparent I really knew and loved in my childhood, died about five hours before I won a full college scholarship. I remember sitting in the main office of Lincoln High School with the other recipient, staring in the beaming faces of the principal and her assistant.

Don’t you want to call anyone? Ms. Bunch asked me, pushing the phone across her desk at me. Dial nine first.

Dad picked up when I called home because he and my uncles were there planning the funeral. His voice choked, half from pride, he said, and half because they just really needed some good news. I felt sorry for myself then, at 18, thinking how I had missed out on being really happy because I was so sad about Gramma.


Caption: Three brothers: Paul, Jim and Ray (my dad) in my parents’ front yard

Six years later on my wedding day in a shower of holy water, I looked across the altar at my new husband and my best friends in the world in matching wine-red dresses; after we toasted and gave our speeches at the reception later that day, three of them barely spoke to me again, having outgrown me like an old shoe. Or perhaps I outgrew them.


Caption: Signing the shoe: Bridesmaids and me

When I was 32 weeks pregnant with our first child, my water broke as I got up to get dressed for work. Eleven hours later I was a new mother, exhausted and terrified but elated that he had survived.

The next year was a blessing and a nightmare, feeding him every two hours around the clock, worrying obsessively about germs and immunity, scrutinizing his every move for evidence of a delay in speech, movement, or emotion. Every night when I laid him down to sleep I was pretty sure he would die by the morning. You’re so lucky, friends would say. You never really had to be all that fat. And I could only smile blankly, exhausted.


Caption: My husband Ben and our tiny son, Chris

After he turned a year old, and I started sleeping at night again, I began to see that it wasn’t really that nightmares had to come with each good thing; rather, it seemed like something good came to follow every nightmare, if I just waited long enough.

This afternoon, my son, who is now a smart mischievous four-year-old, made his first joke. Holding a pointed potato chip between his fingers and flying it around the room, he looked at us and smiled. It’s a rocket chip, he said, and burst into giggles. If someone had told me about moments like these I might have had more courage in the early days when I was spending more time sterilizing tiny plastic widgets than sleeping. It’s funny how the hard things seem to fade in black and white, even the really hard things.


Caption: Chris and me picking grapefruit this Thanksgiving

There is only a six percent chance that a baby will be born premature for no apparent reason, but I bet the odds of having a surprise grapefruit tree in your parents’ yard is even smaller than that. Every year we bear our burden of the fruit in equal parts joy and dread. I like the mixed blessing of their fresh-squeezed juice, bright and bitter all at once.

Lisa Nash has lived in Tallahassee, Florida for her whole life. She almost got away in her early twenties, but she met her husband and discovered it was the perfect place to raise a family, so she stayed. She has her MA in Rhetoric and Composition from Florida State University, and works as an online teacher and tutor of college composition. She writes about the myths and rhetoric of American motherhood at her blog The Guilted Age, and is a regular contributor to Modestly Yours. Occasionally, she shaves her legs.

Image credits: Ray Colletti, Lisa Nash (Thanksgiving) and Miguel Jimenez (wedding).