Forbidden Fruit

I can't even remember now precisely how it started. I certainly never intended to go into smuggling. I guess one thing led to another: one day Nellie gave me a couple of apples, and next thing I knew, I was lugging a bag of contraband produce home every Tuesday.

Most nursing homes have some sort of snack cart  for the residents--healthy and not-so-healthy munchies that they can take back to their rooms and eat whenever they want. Nellie's is no exception; I always saw the cart in the hall when I passed, full of apples, oranges, bananas, pudding and jello cups, cookies, crackers and chips. Each afternoon when we sat down to tea, she tried to make me eat approximately one of everything. I tried and tried to explain to her that I really had eaten lunch not too long before and would be eating dinner as soon as I got home, but she always seemed to be sure that actually I was starving. Finally I had to resort to simply refusing to eat it all. "Well, then, you must take it home and eat it later," she insisted.

I sighed. Arguing with Nellie is fairly futile. "Alright," I conceded, "but I don't eat a lot of sweets and chips for snacks. Mostly fruit."

She took me at my word. I think it was the very next week that she welcomed me with a conspiratorial  smile and hustled me in, directing me (in pantomime, because she has gotten so accustomed to resorting to charades with everyone else that she often forgets that she can actually talk to me) to pull closed the curtain that divides her room from the other half. Somewhat mystified, I obeyed. Once the curtain was drawn, she put a finger to her lips and pointed to a well-worn gift bag on the chair. I raised my eyebrows. "What?" I whispered. "What do you want me to do?"

Gesturing impatiently, she let me know that I was to take the contents of the bag and transfer them to my own--the bag I carry the teapot, cups, and kettle in. I looked inside, and rolled my eyes. There were a week's worth of apples--a generous week's worth--snagged from the snack cart and saved for me. What could I do? I loaded up my bag and said "thank you." As I mentioned, it's hard to argue with Nellie.

That, I think, was the beginning. Since then, she's added the occasional orange or banana to the mix (though she rolls up the bananas in newspaper because she can't stand the smell) and sometimes applesauce or fruit cocktail. I've had to explain to her that she really shouldn't take the diabetic shakes for me. Most weeks she has collected a bag of popcorn which she tells me I must feed to the birds. The birds in my neighborhood must look forward to Tuesday evenings; perhaps they celebrate with a movie night. But that was the beginning of my smuggling career.