Citrus – Daily Writing 02 April
Apr 1st, 2009 | By admin | Category: Daily WritingSegmented into quarters the orange pieces rest on the kitchen table, smiling faces on a glossy white plate. The afternoon sun pulses in through the wide bay window looking over the back yard where the carefree children play with thoughtless abandon. She calls out that the afternoon snack is ready and they come scampering in like newborn puppies, a little out of control overshooting their mark and coming to a slippery halt.
In their minds an expectation of afternoon tea runs to something like pancake thin slices of processed white bread with a slipper of butter and a shower of hundreds and thousands. The taste of the artificial sweetness has their tongues wagging with anticipation, and then they are met with the boring reality of orange quarters. Resignedly they begin to suck and slurp, their tiny teeth serrating the rough skin from the wet juicy fibres of citrus. There’s that temporary disgust as they actually get a bit of the white flaky inner skin rather than knotty orange threads, and eating the outside is unthinkable. Experience long ago let them be aware that that shiny pitted surface is a no-go zone. The segments have an interesting consistency and one of them thinks of the time he was walking across a bit of marshy ground how it gave way bellow his Wellington boots…..
