The guava,
by Leonor Henríquez

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        I closed my eyes and let its sweetness slide down my throat and into my memories.

In the garden of my childhood home there were mango, banana, avocado and guava trees.

There were also bougainvilleas and rose bushes that offered their aromas. In the background, a wall covered with Riqui Riquis (family of Bird of Paradise) where the hummingbirds went to drink.

As a child, all that exuberance seemed “normal” to me.

Today, after a brief convalescence, when the thermometer plummets and reads -20° C and the snow covers my Canadian landscape with its luminous blanket, remembering that idyllic orchard seems extraordinary to me.

And all thanks to guava juice a dear friend gave me.

I didn’t even know that it was available in these arctic latitudes, but yes, as in my childhood, Del Monte brand.

While I was enraptured by the kindness and “the smell of guava”  (title of a book about Gabriel García Márquez), I went on a journey full of greenery, fragrances, toucans and macaws.

From the distance, I could see that restless girl, exploring, climbing the branches, running through the garden that saw her grow up.

A dreamlike plot, a place of abundance.

I went back to the refrigerator and poured myself another glass full of tropics, of fruit pecked by the little birds, of my mother painting her pale roses in the garden’s “caney”.

They are my roots that today climb into the snowy branches of the majestic pine forests.

The truth is that, aside from all the nutritional benefits of guava (source of almost all the alphabet vitamins), its “magical realism” goes even further.

After a brief maintenance visit to the operating room: chicken soup and, I would add, guava juice for the soul.

Just what the doctor ordered.

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