Back when I lived in Fiji as a kid, my sister and I would walk down the hill from our house toward the sea. A little Chinese grocery store stood on the corner. We’d get the usual sweets there, but also these dried prunes covered in salt and a little sugar. They tasted intense, but I loved them. Today I saw them in a store and bought them, although I don’t know if these are actually prunes. It’d been a long time since I’d had one.

This is what they look like:

They still had that familiar sharp, fruity taste that instantly made me remember looking down at Suva harbor and the bay and the tropical breeze coming up the hill and the red flowered trees that gave me such insane allergies and all the times my mom brought back sea turtles for her biological illustrations and they’d flop around on the grass of our lawn until it was time to take them back, and the flower man as we called him who came by with ginger and frangipani and hibiscus and a leathery smile, and the little palm frond tree house my sister and I built, and trying the local rotgut, yongona, for the first time, and how much I loved taro, which is a little like potato, and how we’d roast meat with coconut juice from coconuts we’d chopped down from a tree, the meat in banana leaves and cooked in the ground with coals…and how during hurricanes, the Fijians would just be going about their business, standing at the bus stop, waiting to go to work with the wind rising all around, and the botanical gardens with the eels in the little ponds and the strange, ridiculously iridescent insects and…after about the second one they were so bitter I couldn’t even take another bite.

Ah well, sometimes you can’t go home again. I don’t know if I can even finish the packet.