outwait outrun outwit





TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


10.28.21


I thought of the Californian countryside the other day. Not the countryside I had seen as an adult, but the one I saw as a child, staring out of the backseat of a white Camaro on a rare day’s trip my family made beyond the city we lived in at the time. All those golden fields and vineyards and the part of the world where it reeked of the dung of countless cattle, us rolling up the windows despite the heat. At one point we stopped to get a basket of strawberries at a roadside stand, which we ate in the car as we drove further and further away from my parents’ woes.

Never again did I taste strawberries like the ones we bought on that trip. Those strawberries are forever infused with all the purity of childhood memory, wholly separate from the melancholy of those days, the sadness of refugee parents. Those strawberries were so good, it’s as if that day had never happened; those strawberries had never existed.

Did Dad remember that day? What other landscapes did my parents think of as we drove along those lonely stretches, past drought-parched hills where birds of prey circled above oaks, a world away from the homeland they couldn’t begin to describe to me, because they’d have to describe it to me in a language we didn’t share.

What we did share: that dusty country road, the heat that made our thighs stick to the Camaro’s red leather interior, the effervescent taste of those strawberries.




<<

hosted by DiaryLand.com

real time web analytics