Thursday, December 18, 2008

Dance

Here, fruit and vegetable carts float through the city like shrimp trawlers. Some always go to the same place. Some are more dynamic, moving all day, loudly yelling the name of their wares.

"Corn! Corn! Corn!" and on, and on, all day.

Today, I passed one full of the tiny winter clementines that we have in our city, that seem to taste sweeter than anything I've had at home. They're not much bigger than a quarter, and for maybe twenty minutes a day I'll carefully make a cut with my pocketknife, peel and eat the tiny wedges one at a time like the sections of a clock. Left will be a pile of orange peels, the fragrance of oranges, a sweet acid taste, and a burning on my tongue like fire.

The man I passed was yelling as usual. "Oranges! Oranges!" And his three-year-old daughter was moving back and forth to the rhythm of it, the familiarity of it, swaying and precisely moving her hands in a dance probably thousands of years older than she is, or will ever be.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

and zing goes the strings of my heart.

Justin Scott said...

I love where this blog is going.