Peeling clementines is great for fine motor development. It offers a rich sensory experience to smell the sweet oil, feel the textures, learn how much force is necessary, and how much is too much. If you count the segments, you’re touching on math. And there is so much language a child can use to talk through the experience! I always made my preschool students peel their clementines. At the beginning of the year I’d help get them started, but by the end they were pros. Sometimes I’d use this to illustrate development at conference time.
At 2 and 6 my daughters can peel a clementine. On car rides I sometimes hand them back with the strebel—a word my eldest invented for the little stalk at the top that is as funny as its actual name, the peduncle—picked off. But I usually peel them myself, making sure to remove the stringy bits, too. I’ve only recently stopped cutting grapes for my eldest. Something I was still doing mostly out of habit. Mostly. And I never hand them a banana with the bitter nub attached.
I was once given the advice to never remove the leaves from strawberries. Cut the leaves off once and you’ll find yourself doing it for the next 15 years, they said. For a time, my eldest preferred to eat the leaves and discard the fruit, so I left them for her. Now that her tastes have caught up to the rest of us I find myself cutting the leaves off. It would be easier to throw the berries in her lunch container whole. She would still eat them. But this isn’t about ease.
I trim off the whitish parts and my hands turn into my mother’s. I can even see the shadow of the burn mark she bears on her left hand. It is shiny. The skin is wrinkled and yet it feels smooth. It is the softest skin I’ve ever felt. Softer even maybe than my babies’. And though I haven’t really stroked it since I was a child, like my babies’, I remember just how it feels to glide my fingers over that part of her. I would know my mother’s hands anywhere. There are none other like hers. Except for mine. Quartering these berries.
My maternal grandmother’s hands are a mystery to me. I never met her, and the large portrait of her that hangs in her house in Minillas stops at her chest. And yet I sense her hands in mine, too. I know without needing to be told that she could wield a machete with precision. I’ve seen as much in my aunts. I hold the strawberries in my palm and cut into them. There is risk. Frankly, it is stupid, but it means one less thing to wash. Ease matters even in care, which is so often full of drudgery. And I trust myself with this knife.
My husband says there is a joke in here about yeridat ha-dorot—a concept from Judaism about the decline of the generations. A paring knife is puny in comparison to a machete. This knife feels plenty sharp to me, though, and I’m not sure how much of my grandmother’s precision is imagined. After all, don’t I have an uncle with a missing finger?
Who cut fruit for my father? It seems unlikely that it would be his mother, though she may have requested and managed the cutting. “Gustavito, hay mujeres que pelan tomates y mujeres que no,” (“There are women who peel tomatoes and women who don’t,”) she is said to have warned him upon meeting my mother. My mother who smiled and agreed with her all while serving her tomatoes with their skin on. Maybe it was one of his nanas. Or an aunt. Or maybe it was his mother after all? He must have learned from someone how to love me. How to rinse grapes for his granddaughters, the same grapes that he picks out of the bag and pops into his own mouth without a second thought.
Sometimes when the strawberries are sour I sprinkle a bit of sugar over them. I let them sit on the counter a bit to warm up and sweeten. “I don’t like strawberries,” my daughter states, the red juice on her chin. “What else do you have for me?”