NEIGHBOURHOOD TREATS
Favoured mode of transport to reach the treats? Bikes—with the cardboard in the spokes to make that farting engine sound. Taken with us on the mission, a block or two from home? Nothing but a voracious appetite for fresh fruit, whether plums, apples, pears, cherries or berries of one kind or another. We didn’t take our wooden or water guns, capes, stilts, cardboard wings or gymnastic dance routines (though some moves came in handy).
My younger brother was the ultimate outdoor playing partner because he was fast, daring and wild. He’d disappear for a while, every now and then—perhaps we’d argued or I’d rejected his next play idea, or… he was hungry for something sweet. When that happened, I never knew where he went. But half the time, he’d return panting, mouth stained, hands hugging the belly of his T-shirt.
“I’m going back! Wanna come?”
Of course, I’d drop everything, come down from the tree I was in, or the wooden play house where I’d been pattering about, talking to my imaginary children. I’d jump on my banana-seat bike while he was already ripping away up the lane on his. He’d guide me to where he’d found the fruit in our neighbourhood—the hood we knew like the back of our hands, thanks to years of delivering the Sunday North Shore News. Once or twice, in the excitement, he’d skid and scrape his knee, or I’d lose him, to my great shame.
And there it was, miraculously, yet another new find: a beautiful, big, fruit tree, busting with hundreds of juicy purple plums, succulent yellow pears—you name it, our hood had it. It was always better for me, if a few generous branches hung over a fence, or if the spoils were not hard to reach, inside someone’s property. He, being a ninja force to be reckoned with, would scale just about anything in his way to the treasure. I, on the other hand, was less inclined to trespass or risk breaking my neck. I collected what he threw my way, in my pockets, in a self-made T-shirt pouch and, of course, in my mouth!
“There’s no way they’ll be able to eat four-hundred apples before they all rot into the ground!” my brother and I would repeat to each other, for moral comfort. The ultimate question was always “Why don’t they pick their treasure themselves?”
More than once, we got caught. Nothing bad ever happened (besides a day or two of diarrhea for the binge). In fact, I remember the kind, elderly woman in her day-nighty, who spotted my brother in her plum tree—I was keeping guard in the back lane, eating—and instead of scolding him, she asked us both to continue! She was so pleased we were doing this difficult job, and that we were obviously happy as bees about the prize. Over time, we ended up providing a kind of rebel, fruit-picking community service, acknowledged or not—an eight- and ten-year-old—paid in the priceless sweet and juicy things that grew bountifully in our hood.
Aidan