The flight from Huatulco to Oaxaca City is a six-seater, jumpy and right there in the clouds so close to the the pilot that it feels like you are flying in a dream low over the scrubby Sierra Madre del Su. Just enough room on my lap to open my sketchbook and use the bitten end of pink tropical almond fruit to draw, its tannins eating into the soft paper beautifully. The thin metal skin of the airplane, its wings holding up on the air like a living thing.
We were supposed to meet the cochineal farmer later that day and I’d almost made us late. I saw a stain on the tarmac and started collecting the strange fruits there and the baggage handler helped me reach up into the branches to collect the pink-red ripe fruits. He called them almonds and they were the shape of almonds, and he motioned me to try one. It was warm and tart and sweet and bright as pomegranate juice, and it tasted like it could dye fabric and I got lost in that. Then the baggage handler, in his reflective vest and easy smile, picked me a few more fruits from the lower branches of tree at the edge of the runway and I put them in my pocket and ran with my bag across the runway and up the aircraft stairs into the tiny hatch of the plane where everyone was waiting. We took off and way up there in the clouds hunched between the director filming me on his new iPhone and the co-pilot in his sunglasses and earphones and the blue sky and the dusty jungly foothills, I pressed the edge of the almond-thing to the paper and the pulpy fruit, with its hard underseed, made a perfect brush. The paper was so smooth and white and I could pretend for a moment that I was not being filmed but just alone in my sketchbook inside a dream in Mexico, and from the makeshift brush and makeshift ink, I made an inktest from fruit and sky. So often the fruits around seeds, like the hull of black walnuts, are full of the most usable pigment. I was thrilled that almonds produced such colour. It was only when I looked it up today that I realized that these were not the common almond tree whose nuts we eat, but something called the sea almond or tropical almond or terminalia catalpa a species unrelated to almonds with its own stories and magics.
It reminded me of an earlier almond colour. The green almond a vibrant yellow-green pulsing from inside with a velvety lunar green on the outside. And I remember their thud on sand. The way they looked in a pile in the indigo-dyed skirts the women held out like nets to capture these falling gems.
I was in my twenties the woman I’d said I was going to marry was a few years older working in France for the year while I finished my degree. We spent the first night back together in Hotel Luna Park, little window overlooking the silvery roofs the warren of streets around the 11e. It was maybe spring. Parisian green, white wall, metal frames, the bed almost at the window, glass tiles in the shower. Slept together with only the strangeness of it had been so long remembering eachother’s bodies. Now I think maybe I was too tentative that first night or sometime before that and anyway the next day she blurted out,
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