Wild fruits of my hometown

Nowadays, fruits are abundant and cheap, so anyone can buy them for their children and grandchildren to eat, and the kids no longer have to yearn for them like we did in the past. But our generation, in our search for snacks, enjoyed exploring, running, jumping, and climbing. Although there were risks, it was generally a lot of exercise, making us healthy and agile.

My small, narrow hometown on An Hoa islet ( Vinh Long province) is divided into two regions: the upper part, from Loc Thuan to Vang Quoi, Phu Vang, Phu Thuan, and Chau Hung, has freshwater year-round, so it's teeming with fruit trees like rambutan, mango, longan, and plum; while the area from Dinh Trung to Dai Hoa Loc, Thanh Tri, Thua Duc, and Thoi Thuan, is close to the sea, with six months of saltwater and six months of freshwater, making fruit trees scarce. My paternal grandparents' home is in Thanh Tri, and my maternal grandparents' is in Dai Hoa Loc, so besides coconut trees and coconut palms, there are hardly any other fruits. Therefore, even now, in my memory, the fruits of my hometown are mostly wild berries.

First, there's the custard apple, which my鄉霜 (locally known as "mãng cầu chà"). Custard apples grow wild in abundance, along canal banks, pond edges, and near rice paddies... As soon as they appear on the tree, they bear fruit. Nobody pays much attention to them until they ripen to a golden yellow on the tree, then we children pick them, hide them in the rice jar to ripen further before eating them.

Sometimes, they wouldn't even bother eating, just savoring the delicate, rich aroma that permeated the rice jar and clung to each piece of the peel… The star fruit had many seeds, a sour taste, sometimes even a little bitter. Anyway, when the adults were away, the children would mash the star fruit with a little sugar, making it a delicious meal, because that sourness, combined with the sugar, became so sweet and fragrant! Later, adding ice made it even better!

The bottle gourd is available year-round, but the acacia tree only grows during the dry season. The acacia is a large woody tree with oval leaves, a thorny trunk, and ripe fruits that are reddish-pink with a sweet, sometimes slightly astringent, flesh. Back then, children lacked food, so they often climbed acacia trees to pick the fruit – the sweet acacia trees, climbed year after year, had their thorns worn down.

Many of the good climbers picked the big, cracked fruits, which we called "giant acacia." Those who couldn't climb used bamboo sticks to pick them. Afterwards, the whole group would sit under the cool shade of the tree and enjoy each delicious segment of acacia fruit… Sometimes, after picking them, we would string them together and wear them around our waists to… show off our achievement to each other!

Before I knew it, the rainy season arrived, and the school year was almost over. I wandered along the sandy country road lined with dense rows of fig trees. Fig trees are long-lived and grow very slowly; some trees seemed to grow for over a decade without ever growing (later I learned from reading the newspaper that the ancient fig trees in Đường Lâm, Hanoi, are over a thousand years old, and that this is where Ngô Quyền tied his elephant before defeating the Southern Han army).

The small, finger-sized, ripe, bright yellow duoi fruits were a delightful surprise treat for children. My maternal grandparents' house also had many duoi trees, planted as a hedge. Every year, I ate ripe duoi fruits, so I knew each tree by heart: some had tiny, dark-colored but very sweet fruits; others were laden with fruit, turning the whole tree yellow, but only birds ate them because the fruits were small and bland; and some had large, sweet fruits but were very sparse… Later, when I returned to my hometown and saw those duoi trees, it was as if I saw my grandmother huddled somewhere sweeping leaves, and my heart would fill with nostalgia…

Besides that, there were guava, mangrove, and water coconut trees growing wild everywhere. After school, the children would wander around picking the fruit, sometimes getting scolded by adults for "disturbing the neighborhood," but who knew that at that age, they craved all sorts of food, and their families were poor, so there was hardly anything to eat... Now, there are so many fruits, and they're cheap, everyone can buy them for their children, so the children no longer have to yearn like we did. But our generation, in our search for snacks, loved to explore , run, jump, and climb, and although there were risks, it was generally a lot of exercise, making us healthy and agile.

MINH HAI

Source: https://www.sggp.org.vn/trai-dai-que-nha-post831887.html