I recently traveled home to the Caribbean to visit my mom and my sister. It was the lull before the excitement of the holiday season kicked in. But there was a different kind of excitement. It was harvest festival season, the time of year when Methodists throughout the region bring their garden and ground produce to decorate sanctuaries.
The capriciousness of life in these tropical islands encourages, if not demands, gratitude and humility. For someone to have sown and reaped means their fruit trees and vegetable crops have withstood or escaped the ravages of hurricanes, torrential rains, earthquakes and droughts, not to mention the foraging iguanas, agoutis, goats and sheep. Harvest is a season of thankfulness.
Memories of harvest season from more than half a century ago came roaring back when I drove into the countryside one Saturday evening to deliver several breadfruits for the harvest festival at Bethesda Methodist Church. There I saw church members preparing the church for the next morning’s harvest service. The men delivered the fruits and flowers. The women decorated.
They adorned the doorways with stalks of sugar cane and the window ledges with bunches of green bananas. The rail where knees bowed for communion was covered with mounds of sugar apple, tamarind, avocados, coconuts, guavas, golden apple, five-finger fruit, papayas, soursop and breadfruit, all heartily in season.
They garnished the fruits with heliconia, marigolds and ferns. Baked goods — fruitcake, black cake, cassava bread and pound cake — sat on a table near the communion rail.
The activity filled me with nostalgia. Fruits have always marked the seasons of my life. Mangoes and guineps in the summer, sugar apple and soursop in the fall. Those were the seasons before I left home for college in the U.S. 40 years ago.
For the past decade, citrus has marked the New Year’s holiday.
My wife and I have been migratory. We’ve lived in Maryland, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and now Georgia. My family’s meandering journey along the East Coast has taken us to various houses, apartments and neighborhoods, both urban and suburban.
Along the way, we’ve enjoyed great neighbors and made lifelong friends. We’ve planted beautiful flower gardens, but for someone who was raised in the tropics, one thing was missing: fruit trees.
That changed in 2016 when we bought a house in north Florida. The main attraction was its large rooms and a home office with built-in bookshelves. The bonus, I soon discovered, was a citrus tree.
Our first December in that house, we ripped up carpets, tore down wallpaper, painted walls, and saw how the orange orbs ripening in the cold December air lit up the drab winter landscape. I learned they were satsumas, a kind of mandarin orange. The first one I picked and tasted made me grimace. So sour! But there was a hint of sweetness. It gave me reason to wait.
As Christmas turned to the New Year, the sour fruit had ripened from lemon to honey. I had heard that ripening citrus needs the cold to become sweet. But Trevor Hylton, an urban agriculture extension agent from Florida A&M University, told me it depends on the variety. If the fruit comes from a sour variety, no amount of frigid weather will make it sweet. My satsumas, however, simply needed more time to ripen.
In the years that followed, New Year’s Day became the first day of our personal harvest. Even as fields of row crops lay fallow, my satsumas shone like a Christmas tree.
We never bought a picker. We improvised. My wife or I would place a ladder near the tree and climb to the top. We used a rake in one hand to grab the limb and scissors in the other to clip the fruit.
Often my job was to stand below and catch the fruit, like a wide receiver or a cricketer, as they fell. As the wicker basket filled up, we separated fruit by quality. We kept those that fell and were damaged, while unblemished fruits were destined for giving.
I took ripe fruit for a senior member of my Sunday school class. A lifelong Floridian, he loved citrus. His face lit up when he saw the plastic bag bulging with lemon-fragrant satsumas.
But the best part of our harvest was the ability to pack them in small boxes and ship them to friends and relatives who lived in cold places.
We needed to grab them before they were damaged by the annual late-January freeze. In January 2023, dozens of fruits still hung on the tree when an arctic blast hit the Southeast. Within days, the tree was leafless. All the unpicked fruit had been reduced to mush. There were fewer boxes shipped that year.
A year later, our tree bounced back. Its green canopy returned. By late spring, the abundance of green fruit was unmistakable. As the summer approached, orange orbs shone through the green foliage. Limbs hung heavy with ripening fruit. High and low and in between, the crop blossomed. It was by far the biggest crop nature had given us since we moved in.
More fruit meant we could add new names and addresses to our shipping list. In-laws, childhood friends, former colleagues. New Jersey, New York, Atlanta, the Carolinas —my friend Bridgette in Raleigh. In retrospect, it was as if our tree understood something at that point that I did not. My wife had been agitating about moving — again. She was packing boxes. Her heart was set on a Victorian house with high ceilings.
The tree must have been listening. That bumper crop was its farewell gift to us.
Even as new fruit was beginning to appear, we bought a new house — that “forever” home in south Georgia, across the Florida state line.
This New Year’s brings a new season. There will be no fruits to harvest. There will be no citrus to pack and ship. Should I alert my relatives and friends?
My new geography comes with blessings and moments of joy. Each half hour, when I hear the chime of the clock tower at the county courthouse, I am reminded of the church bells of my youth: tolling to announce weddings and funerals; summoning me to worship; reconnecting me with the faith passed down to me by my grandmother.
Red and white and pink camelias decorate my new yard. I am counting on the gladiolas, tulips and peonies to bring me cheer this spring. They will be a harvest not of fruit but of beauty — a seasonal gift I will always embrace and celebrate.
