juicy at the expense of flesh

6 for $5. Bargain. I carried them home from the market in my black string market bag, as they staunchly exuded their orange glow in the grey Elwood day. Tangelo. Sometimes called honeybells, although I have never heard that word cross anyone's lips. The size of an adult's fist apparently. Really? Which adult? There are a lot of adults and their fists are all quite different in size. I went to school with a girl who could fit her whole fist in her mouth. She had a fairly large mouth. And a fist the size of a tangelo. A tangelo is a hybrid of a tangerine and a pomelo or grapefruit and it is described as being 'juicy at the expense of flesh'. Roll that phrase around your mouth. Now that is a sexy collection of words.

Can you buy memories? If so, I paid $5 for 6 tangelos and a sharp and vivid evocation of the past.  These are good tangelos. With the taste of the sweet tangy juice on my tongue, I was in Tauranga on my grandparents' orchard/farm. The scent of orange blossom in the air, the sound of the chooks in the shed, the thought of later picking out the lumps from the willow pattern icing sugar jar and letting them dissolve on my tongue. And eating an orange that tasted like sunshine straight off the tree.

Marcel Proust was the first to use the term involuntary memory in his novel, A la recherche du temps perdu (In remembrance of things past). He describes an incident where he was eating a tea-soaked madeleine and a childhood memory of eating a tea-soaked madeleine with his aunt is suddenly triggered and along with it an exquisite sensation of joy and a series of memories about his childhood home and town.

Unexpected moments where we unwittingly unleash the essence of the past. Portals between the present and what has gone before.