peels

the things i don’t know about fruit

My clumsy Canadian fingers struggle to pull at the peel of the pomelo. I do not know citrus fruits terribly well; I live in a land of imported citrus and worries about tariffs on orange juice and trying to buy non-American produce. There's only one kind of lemon at the grocery store, called "lemon." I don't know what kind it is. There are limes and oranges - maybe a few types of orange, I saw mandarins (Israel, I won't buy them), navel oranges (Florida, I'm not buying those either), blood oranges (Spain). There are grapefruits and then the aisle gives way to a run of different fruits, most of which I've never tried or heard of till I was an adult; we didn't import them during my grocery store days.

But the pomelo sits alongside the passionfruit and dragon fruit and mangosteen. I pick one up, hefting its bulk in the netting and plastic. I read about the pomelo in a book earlier this week, the description of eating it pulled me in, despite my lack of familiarity with citrus. I put it in my cart, and here I am, searching how to cut open a pomelo and peel it.

Several minutes later, I have a pile of rose gold citrus on a plate. It's not terribly juicy, but I'm not sure if that's a problem. Would it retain any juice on its journey from Viet Nam?

The fruits I know are hardy, the ones that grow in these short springs and summers I've grown up with, and they don't provide me with any deep knowledge about citrus. We eat clementines at Christmas, and sometimes I have a hankering for oranges outside of that season.

I pop a piece of pomelo in my mouth, its sour-sweetness filling my mouth. My hands smell like summer.

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It's the time of year where I start to look longingly at pictures my friends in far-away places post of their gardens, the things they're watching grow, and the blossoms around their homes. There's a frost advisory this week, and even though our patio is technically over a heated parking garage, my partner and I gamefully put a couple of old towels over top the large pots he's tending on our patio. He announced at the tail end of winter this year that he wanted to try growing strawberries in pots on our patio. I know he's been thinking about this since last summer, where one of our neighbours had strawberries in a hanging basket (they let some go to rot, and my partner was appalled), and another set of neighbours moved out, leaving a number of plants on their patio. We had planned to take them, but wanted to wait a day to confirm they had really moved out. The next day, the plants were gone.

We bought roots and soil and two large pots, and waited.

Spring comes slowly to us on the east coast of Canada; the really only nice part of spring is in the last few weeks before the spring is over, when the iciness of the year finally lifts, and leaves have finally started to grow. It's been chilly and wet this spring, I've been looking at quilted jackets and considered buying gloves this week when I spent an afternoon wandering downtown, with hands so cold I couldn't hold my phone.

Fruits are growing, and the ads at the grocery store are trying to convince me that it's time for certain crops, but I've spent my life here: I know that there's nothing much yet.

One thing that has emerged is rhubarb. The tangy, sour stalks have started to appear at the local market and I've already purchased two pounds of them. One topped a crumble cake last weekend, declared a hit by all, including the eight year old daughter of our friend, and fed everyone for breakfast for a few days. The second pound came home with me on Friday, and it lies in wait. It's too early for strawberries, and I won't buy fresh ones imported from somewhere else, but I long for some strawberry rhubarb syrup. I bought a bag of frozen local strawberries, and I will get to work on boiling them together soon, letting them sit on the stove in frothy pink goodness. I'll strain the fruits from the liquid, leaving me with bright red and sunny syrup to put in sparkling water, and a fruit mixture to top yogurt with. Every year, I make a couple batches of this syrup, carefully following Smitten Kitchen's recipe, and I then try to stretch it as much as I can. I think of days on the beach in Miramichi, with my thermal cup of strawberry rhubarb soda, reading in the sun and swimming in the river.

I've been auditioning beaches this spring, but it's hard to get the measure of them as a swimming and reading spot in the wind and rain, and so few people stomping on them.

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I made "eating a fruit" one of the habits I'm tracking this year. Somehow, somewhere, I stopped eating fruit as much as I did as a child. Fruit with every meal. My family went through 35 apples a week, everyone eating one a day. I would go with my dad to Stirling's, to get a big basket of apples. There would be bananas and pears and grapes and clementines in my house. Berries in the summer, my dad having taken me and my youngest sibling to the U-Pick, or a spot he noticed on the side of the road, filling mixing bowls and buckets he took from work with berries.

We would head to the old family house in Cape Breton, the home my father and his six siblings grew up in, where we would meet with cousins and aunts and uncles and bask in the familyness of having some sort of cottage, and take up whatever abandoned vessels had found their way to the house, to go pick blueberries in the fields. We would pick raspberries off the bushes that had grown around my grandmother's roses, both wild and untamed by the time they reach my memories. My favourite bowl was a metal mixing bowl that once had handles on both sides, but one had come off. I filled it many times over as a kid.

Left to my own devices as an adult, and left to my own loneliness, fruit stopped being so central to my life. I'm going to change that, I announced to myself at the beginning of 2025. I'm going to eat all the fruit.

And so, I go to the grocery store every week and look at the fruit available to me, and sometimes, I bring home unfamiliar ones.