Bittersweet fruit

When I was five I went to stay at my grandmother's house for two days. No one told me where my parents were. I don't remember who dropped me off. This was not a special treat, time for me and grandma.

It was close to Easter, I know that much. My grandmother cut toast into tiny triangles and let me watch 'Via Allegre', even though I couldn't speak Spanish. I was mesmerized by the ferris wheel, the Spanish children laughing all day in an amusement park. Though foreign, they were magic to me, poetry in lace-trimmed blouses. My grandmother tucked me in tight, I wiggled to catch my breath and wished to stay forever. Two days of quiet and softly buttered toast and suddenly I was picked up by my father.

At home things would go on, they probably thought I would not remember these days, or the ones that later came to pass. I suppose I hugged my mother when I got home. In bed, deflated, she probably smiled. I wonder if they bothered to give me any explanation. There would not be any real talk of a baby for several years.

A decade would pass before my mother told me that the doctor blamed Agent Orange for these losses. It would be another decade before I understood that it was not a man with a secretive job that hated my father, but an invisible mist that rained down on a country that it would take too long for me to believe existed. I am the eldest of four children, but my brother and I are seven years apart and each an only child, by most definitions.