Passion Fruit Diplomacy

For years, we’d been trying to entice two kiwi vines to create some shade over the picnic table in the backyard. We gave them questionable water during a drought, fenced them off from predatory puppies and toddlers. As the years passed, they just looked sadder and sadder.

Finally, we dug them up and put in a single passion fruit vine, hoping for — well, hoping for nothing, really, but a bit of green. When a neighbor first offered me the withered purple fruit from her vine, I declined.

The leaves appeared within a season and bolted up to cover the arbor. And then last spring:  flowers! Delightful fireworks of purple and white. A flower people see their own stories in: for the Inca and Aztec people, the plant’s original cultivators, the flower’s whirl of spokes may have connected it to the sacred Sun. Friars returning from South America in the early 1600s found the five wounds of Christ and the 10 disciples in its petals.  In India is is the Krishna Kamal, representing aspects of the Mahabharata; in Japan, the clock flower, for its dial-like face.

Mine is a conversion story. When the fruit started to drop, I ignored them until there simply were too many. They wore me down. Each morning, I cut one open and scooped the seeds onto my yogurt. I started to look forward to the routine: walking out into the yard to find the fruit that had fallen in the night, then the fruit splitting open like a geode, the bright yellow pulp inside the rough exterior.

When I was in high school, there was a poster of life lessons in the bathroom. One of them: plant zucchini only if you have a lot of friends. Years later, I found myself in need of further instruction. Each day became cloudy with a certainty of passion fruit, an endless purple rain.

Enter the humble cardboard box. Alone, for me, it is a sign of mild shame from ordering online. But filled with surplus passion fruit and left by the sidewalk, it become a neighborhood meeting point! A conversational topic with people you’ve never met! A beacon of positivity and scurvy prevention in a cruel world!

Also, it becomes empty. Which is good, because it is spring again, and the flowers are blooming, and the wind is blowing. Soon a morning will come when the ground will be covered in more passion fruit than I can eat. Let me know if you’d like a few.

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