Infinite Petals

What exactly is a kumquat? For her 10th story in The Crop Cycle series, Shane Mitchell lands in a Central Florida town, where the last growers hold out against developers, to learn why these curious sweet-tart citrus cousins are so celebrated.

Words by Shane Mitchell | Photos by Josh Letchworth

My great-aunt Kathleen Lenore Anderson, everyone called her Kat, was wild for adventure. She drove a cream-colored Cadillac DeVille, one of those late-1960s land yachts that took up more than its fair share of the road, and was not above terrorizing slowpokes on wicked switchbacks in the Great Smoky Mountains outside her home in Knoxville, Tennessee. “Scoot! Scoot! Scoot on down the road,” she said, waving her hand imperiously if other drivers didn’t pull over and get out of her way. More than once my sister Kaki and I slid sideways across the upholstered backseat. This was long before seat belts were federally mandated, let alone car seats for little girls. To this day, I remember my Nana, Kat’s sister, clutching the front dash and admonishing me for dripping chocolate ice cream on the white brocade interior during one particularly furious drift. Aunt Kat just laughed it off.

Lead foot and all, she was probably the most fun of the great-aunts. In her later years, she wore cat’s eye glasses, because hilarious. A snappy dresser, rider of camels on retired teacher expeditions, always fast with a joke. An entry in the Winthrop College 1922 yearbook referenced her “attracting much attention for her provincial speech.” She had that strong Edisto accent, and shame on those yearbook bitches for their snobbery. In 1936, Kat married a doctor, George Thomas Wilhelm, who served as a professor of preventive medicine at University of Tennessee. Apparently, he was divorced. This was scandalous back then, and for most of her life, my great-aunt referred to a stepson as her “nephew.”

She adored my father, her actual nephew, and every Christmas a gift box of Florida citrus would arrive. Oranges, always. Grapefruit, once in a while. Mom, ever frugal, would sneak them into our Christmas stockings for good luck. But it was the kumquats that confounded me as a kid. Coddled in waxed paper, the tiny fruit glowed temptingly like nuggets of gold. (Their Cantonese name, gām gwāt, means golden orange.) Every year, I naively hoped that this batch would taste like the juicy navels or Valencias in the same box. And every year, on first bite, the sweet outer skin yielded to puckering disappointment. To be honest, I always thought Aunt Kat was making a cruel joke at my expense, and I gave up on them entirely after those boxes stopped coming, when my dear great-aunt paid off her final speeding ticket and roared past the pearly gates.

How about a kumquat, my little chickadee?

—W. C. Fields, 1940

“When my father was 18, he used to load bushels of kumquats on train cars at the depot in San An,” said Greg Gude, pointing to a black-and-white photograph from 1948 hanging over his desk at the Kumquat Growers packinghouse on an unpaved cul de sac in Saint Joseph, Florida. “People up North called ’em mini oranges or baby oranges. They were used as ornamentals, most didn’t realize you could eat them.”

A burly man with curly gray hair, he swiveled in his worn leather chair to remark on more memorabilia in the office. A framed cover story about his father, Fred, in a local magazine. Brochures featuring a plump cartoon mascot named Katy Kumquat, wearing a billowy chef’s hat and spotless white apron. A faded Grand Champion purple ribbon from the 1980 Pasco County Fair for his mother’s prized kumquat nut bread. Gude’s wife, Fanchone, fielded calls at another desk crammed behind a playpen for their grandchildren. Among the other jumbles in the office were crayon drawings, Lego toys, Christmas ornaments, empty soda cans. On this cloudless Wednesday morning in late January, the Gudes were prepping for their annual open house, timed with the Dade City Kumquat Festival, when thousands descended on this sleepy farming town among rolling hills west of Orlando.

Their kumquats, courtesy of Aunt Kat, wound up in my Christmas stocking.

The Gude Family

Like a lot of native Floridians who still owned a patch of ground wider than a carport, the Gude family grew citrus, mostly as a side hustle to careers in restaurants, military service, and the fire department. (Greg Gude is a retired battalion chief.) His family originally settled outside the hamlet of St. Joe in 1883, when the railroad first came through, which made it easier to ship fruit to distant customers craving a taste of sunshine. Many of his brothers and cousins still live in a tight radius around the original farmhouse, which Gude swore was haunted by a spirit he sometimes spotted in an attic window. His father was born on the property, and his son lived behind the packinghouse on land that belonged to his great-grandfather. After the Great Freeze of 1894 devastated orange groves from Freedtown in Pasco County to the Manatee River, south of Tampa, the family speculated on hardier stock, and that’s how they eventually got into kumquats.

“One of my cousins from my mother’s side was working in a nursery, and he saw this tree,” Gude said. “Nobody really knew the value of it back then, [but] he decided to bring one home and plant it. He’s what got it rolling into St. Joe.” Eventually, Gude’s father also took a chance and planted a small block of these novelties alongside his orange grove. So did a neighbor, who harvested oranges for the county’s largest frozen concentrated juice plant, and built the original concrete-block-and-tin-roof packinghouse on the shared road. Then, according to Gude, his father received a buyout offer in 1971. “Dad was the father of seven boys, a minimum-wage guy working for a gas company, and serving in the National Guard. He had his oranges, but he didn’t have a lot of money in hand. He went to four of his friends and asked if they wanted to be in the kumquat business with him.”

Greg Gude grabbed a trucker’s hat, as Fanchone gathered up recipe cards, and they ambled over to the front door. She turned into the gift shop, where volunteers were arranging jars of kumquat pepper jelly on shelves and laying out bags of kumquat-shaped shortbread cookies on a folding table. I followed her husband through the glare outside, climbed into his UTV, and puttered down the lane to rows of kumquats ready for harvest. The Gudes grew both Nagami and Meiwa varieties. The first had a traditional oval shape; the other was rounder and sweeter. He yanked a few globes off a branch and handed them over. “The Meiwas just don’t hold up,” he said. “They’re very sensitive to cold and heat. If you pick when it’s foggy outside, they’ll bruise and go bad. I mean, they’re just very temperamental, but oddly enough right now they’re doing better than the other ones.” He explained both varieties grew more like a shrub, and had a curious trait of blooming while fruit still hung heavy. “Kumquats bloom for five months, hence why we can go through and pick them in different stages of the season. And sometimes they will have growth year-round because they’re almost ever-bearing.”

I got out of the ute for a closer look. Tiny white petals radiated from a yellow pistil. The scent was more delicate and elusive than oranges, requiring close competition with honeybees and fire ants to catch a sniff.

A dump truck roared past at the end of the road and kicked up an entrail of dust.

Gude opened his phone and pulled up a photograph of the family’s grove back when mature trees, over 50 years old and 15 feet tall, thrived in tight formation, box-pruned to facilitate harvest. That was before foot rot killed them all in 2015. And then a backdoor freeze in 2018 damaged new trees. Then citrus canker attacked. A farmer sprayed herbicide in an adjoining field and the drift stunted yet another planting. 

“There’s a lot of drama right there,” Gude said. “Welcome to Florida.” He started up the ute and headed back to the shed through tall grass.

“I grow the hell out of weeds,” he chuckled. “If I could grow kumquats as good, I’d be a millionaire. But still fixing to put in more trees. Keep trying until we can’t.”

Farmers might be the world’s greatest optimists until they stop being farmers.

Hey, look a-yonder comin’
Comin’ down that railroad track
It’s the Orange Blossom Special
Bringin’ my baby back

—Ervin T. Rouse, 1938

The trees looked haunted, the soul sucked right out of their roots. On a drive the next day between Dade City and Winter Haven, winding through Central Florida’s biggest commercial citrus groves, which extended for miles on either side of the Orange Blossom Trail, disaster lurched into view as I passed overgrown fields with “for sale” signs, where all hope had surrendered to a perfidious bacteria incongruously known as citrus greening. Also called Huanglongbing, or HLB, this disease is evidenced first as yellowing in leaves, followed by a spreading decline in vigor, the bearing of off-season blooms, and bitter fruit. Then, denuded and dead, down to the ground.

 No citrus was immune. All that sunshine in a glass, imperiled.

“This is a citrus tree defender,” said Dr. Manjul Dutt, standing next to a sapling draped in a ghostly pillowcase at the Florida Citrus Arboretum. It’s one of the experimental methods to ward off HLB — swaddling blocks the sap-sucking psyllids responsible for spreading the pestilence, which arrived in Florida by 2005 and quickly ripped through the state’s entire crop. This sheltered grove was a living encyclopedia of all fruits in the Rutaceae family. At least, the 250 varieties that thrive in the subtropical Citrus Belt, give or take a few hybridized weirdos exiled to end rows at the back. Possibly Dutt’s favorite patch. A horticultural scientist with University of Florida’s Citrus Research and Education Center, next door in Lake Alfred, his work was primarily focused on citrus improvement through conventional breeding and biotechnology. Battling HLB was his priority. He was particularly fascinated with fruit that deserves more respect. Like finger limes and kumquats. 

“If you were to test these trees, I would say over 95 percent would test positive for the disease.”

“That’s not good.”

“There are some varieties with tolerance from the disease — some varieties of lemons for example — but nothing is bulletproof.”

Dutt told me he was born in the Himalayan foothills, 5,000 feet above sea level, in Meghalaya, one of India’s far eastern states. Not exactly the right climate for kumquats. “Took me some time to hone my mind to citrus,” he said, as we walked between rows of pomelo, etrog, jackfruit, calamansi, and yuzu. “And this tree is very important for India,” Dutt said, stopping to pick a fibrous, aromatic, pear-shaped fruit considered sacred to Hindus. “It’s called bael.” 

Both fruit and man, a long way from their homeland. 

Dutt’s darkened glasses slipped down his nose in the late-afternoon humidity. He pushed them back up. “I’m extremely sensitive to bright lights, and I work in Florida,” he said, bemused.

Citrus greening, also known to horticulturists as Huanglongbing or yellow dragon disease, is a progressive nightmare for farmers in Central Florida. All that sunshine in a glass, threatened.

The arboretum’s collection of kumquats was clustered around an outbuilding, and included Atalantia hindsii, also known as the Hong Kong kumquat or golden bean, a wild variety with insignificant, bitter fruit, mainly an ornamental. This dwarf shrub led American botanist Walter T. Swingle to claim in 1914 that kumquats “are the most primitive living true citrous fruits.” An ancestor, so to speak, much like the tiny red berries born millennia ago in the Andes that would grow up to become Beefsteaks.

“Kumquats aren’t really in the citrus family, right?” I asked.

“Correct. A citrus relative. It’s cross compatible,” Dutt replied.

“But it’s in a class all by its own little oddball self?”

“Fortunella. Its own genus.”

The earliest description of kumquats dates to 1178, in Chü Lu, a monograph on the oranges of Wên-chou in eastern China, by Sung Dynasty scholar Han Yen-chih. He wrote: “The Chin kan fruit has a golden color, very fine-grained skin, and is considered enjoyable. These fruits are eaten without peeling off their golden coats. When preserved in honey the flavor is still better.” In 1699, English privateer and naturalist William Dampier mentioned their general excellence in one of his memoirs, Voyages and Descriptions, as compared with other oranges he tasted in the Kingdom of Tonquin (Vietnam). Dampier also reported that “cam-quits” were “accounted very unwholesome fruit, especially to such as are subject to fluxes; for it both creates and heightens that distemper.” (Sure, if you ate too many fiber-rich kumquats, they might cause gas, bloating or diarrhea, but scientists had yet to discover that dysentery was caused by poor sanitation and subsequent gut infections, not fruits with golden coats.) Specimens collected on a scientific survey of the Pacific Ocean by the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842 — a voyage delightfully nicknamed The Ex. Ex. — finally caught the eye of acquisitive American arborists. Four years later, Robert Fortune, a Scottish plant hunter, introduced kumquats to Europe. Fortune’s name forms the root for their historical classification, but to be honest, botanists were still bickering over kumquat taxonomy.

Being a bastard child was the kumquat’s strength. They party like a rock star, producing offspring with incredible new flavor profiles. Specialist purveyors who cater to a small cadre of obsessives (read: big-name chefs) were always on the lookout for the next Meyer lemon. Never tasted a Meyer lemon? That’s OK. Not everyone is infatuated with the Venn diagram of sweet and tart.

“Do you have any mandarinquats here?” I asked.

Dutt nodded, and we drifted into the back acre, where these curiosities grew. “Here we have some hybrids made with kumquats,” he said. “Lemonquats, sunquats, citrangequats, mandarinquats. The Lakeland limequat is a cross between a Key lime and a kumquat. The fruit resembles a Key lime but has a different flavor.”

He picked a ripe one, cut it open with a pocketknife, and squeezed.

“Whoa, look at that juice,” I said. “Oh, that smells gorgeous.”

I bit into it. The tart oil lingered for a long time on the tongue.

“So do you drink a lot of juice, Dr. Dutt?”

“I like mandarin juice. I’m more of a sweet juice person.”

Me, I went outside
for check out Wiki’s grave.
Had plumerías on top the dirt
and red anthuriums from my fadda’s patch
and some bagasse sprinkle
on top the grave.
She put one cross
made from guava branch and rope
and she plant one kumquat tree
my fadda wen’ plant
in the big cafeteria bean can.

—Lois-Ann Yamanaka,
“Dead Dogs RIP,” 1994

“Tampa is coming towards us,” Fanchone Gude said, as she walked past the packing line, where Kumquat Growers president Margie Neuhofer was preparing for their first demonstration on Friday morning. “An acre of land is selling for $50,000. Bare land! It’s a really big culture shock to all of us who’ve lived here forever.” 

“All that development is where I lived,” Neuhofer said, adjusting her kumquat bracelet and drop earrings. “My brother-in-law had oranges. We had oranges. And I could go to my carport in my nightgown to get the newspaper. Now I can’t because there’s homes, you know?”

“Oh, right. You don’t want to be running out there in your bathrobe,” I said.

“But I mean, we don’t do bathrobes,” Gude said.

The three of us looked at each other, and cracked up, as only mature women did after blowing past the age of zero F girl.

“Your privacy has gone,” Neuhofer said. 

She pointed to a 200-acre pasture south of the shed, purchased by a doctor who wanted to sell to a developer who will bulldoze and put up a gated estate community, the kind that attracted pro wrestling stars of the WWE or Buccaneers tight ends looking for tax havens.

“There was a bad freeze in our area and it messed everything up in ’83,” she said. “By ’85, a lot of the people weren’t willing to replant. And now if you got a decline, they sell it for homes ’cause the property up here is, they’ve gone, ‘Wow.’ But we are still surviving.”

“Taking the kids to school today, I passed 19 dump trucks full of dirt,” Gude said. 

Both of them worried about what was going to happen to land up the road belonging to an elderly farmer whose sons had no interest in keeping his place going. 

“In a state with so many incomers, what does it mean to be a Florida native?” I asked.

“My grandfather’s family bought land from the Spanish government,” Gude said. “They’ve been here that long. And if you move here, you should learn to live here, not want to change everything.”

On most days, the only people parked under the “Welcome to Saint Joseph, The Kumquat Capital” sign on the side of the packinghouse were delivering rootstock or picking up frozen pulp headed to a processor making kumquat jam and chutney. But once a year, when neighboring Dade City overflowed during the Kumquat Festival, customers detoured down Gude Road to buy Mother Rosemary’s famous kumquat “refrigerator” pie. A part-time employee now bakes the pies, but Greg’s mother developed the original recipe, a creamy concoction held together with condensed milk and Cool Whip.

Out on the lawn, a guitarist finger-plinked the national anthem. A cousin poured his home-brewed kumquat beer and the Knights of Columbus grilled hot dogs with pickled kumquat chutney. Greg Gude hitched a trolley to his tractor and hauled visitors around the grove, as his harvester Tony Dejada snapped Meiwa kumquats off branches with a flick of his wrist, then plopped them in a plastic bucket strapped across his shoulder. He and his wife, Margie, started picking for Kumquat Growers in 1972. Before the freezes and diseases knocked them back, the cooperative harvested up to 18,000 bushels a year. Now, after a drought year, it was down to about 1,000, so the Dejadas worked alone for the most part, with a rhythm all their own.

The trolley turned a corner at the far end of the grove and deposited passengers at a back door so they could watch fruit tumbling down a conveyor belt. Rural packinghouses were always an essential way station between field and regional markets — several Florida citrus sheds have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But compared to commercial facilities for processing oranges, this shed was minuscule, with a single line operated by five seasonal workers who sanitized, sorted, and loaded kumquats into vented clamshells.

Willie Wormack packs fruit and makes kumquat pies for the annual open house at the shed. The original recipe was created by Greg Gude’s mother, Rosemary.

Fanchone Gude greeted the crowd after they found seats on benches against the walls. She passed out kumquats, and then asked how many had ever eaten one before.

I spotted another lady who had already mangled hers, the outer skin peeled down like a tangerine, with the pulp exposed. 

Fanchone changed that. 

“Hold it between your fingers and squeeze until the oil sprays out,” she said. “Then put it in your mouth and chew, chew, chew. It’s two different flavors and you can’t duplicate that.” 

The sensation reminded me of those sweet-tart candies sold in dollar stores. Still an acquired taste, but a happier medium.

Greg Gude chimed in.

“You can even swallow the seeds,” he said. “They expand and curb your appetite. We have one study that said this would help you lose weight.”

His wife shot back.

“Um, are you looking at me ’cause I haven’t?”

The kumquat heart of you
in whom I imagined a flowering
become a tree
I’d tend, nurture,
celebrating each blossom,
each ripening fruit.
A kumquat tree’s branches bear thorns;
the blossoms white, color of innocence,
of grief.

—Jacqueline Kolosov, “Surrender,” 2015

“Kadence had to do her SATs this morning at the high school,” said Courtney Loss, Dade City’s kumquat pageant director, about her title winner. “I told her you’ve got the luck of the kumquat behind you, just breathe, take your time.” 

Loss was on her phone trying to locate Miss Kumquat, who was stuck in traffic after her test. She suffered from a degenerative neuropathy in her hands and struggled to tap the screen. It was Saturday morning, right before the Kumquat Festival kickoff. 

The kumquat court was getting bored waiting. Little girls wearing embroidered sashes and tiaras jumped up and down on the stone seating outside the county courthouse. Tiny Miss Kumquat sat on the ground with her crayons to finish coloring in a cartoon handout. Wee Mister and Young Mister reached for coins in the fountain. Baby Miss needed a diaper change. Loss handed out “Kumquat Royalty” T-shirts. 

“So do you have a queen or princess?” I asked. 

“Well, Miss Kumquat is essentially our queen.”

For a long time, Pasco County had no kumquat queen. Loss’ mother organized the first pageant a quarter century earlier, when the chamber of commerce launched a festival to promote local growers like the Gudes and Neuhofers. Back then, Dade City was buffered from the loom of Orlando by the Green Swamp Wilderness Preserve. As subdivisions encroached along Interstate 75, the city clung to a certain nostalgia for its “cracker cowboy” past. Floridians claimed this uncomfortable term as a mark of their frontier heritage, breathlessly suggesting it first emerged because cattlemen cracked bullwhips to herd the criollo cows introduced by Spanish explorers like Panfilo de Narvaez, who trudged through here in May 1528.

No one wanted to talk about other uses for those whips.

Rayjillo Young, Little Mr. Kumquat, gets ready for the Dade City festival.

Police cruisers began to block off traffic to downtown, where vendors were setting up to sell kumquat ice cream, tea towels, trucker hats, balloons, margaritas, and even kumquat-flavored meatballs to the expected crowd of 30,000 snowbirds. Storefronts competed for best kumquat window decorations. The Sacred Heart Early Childhood Center sliced pies donated by Kumquat Growers at their booth, while several blocks away Greg Gude roped off a pathway to displays filled with netted bundles of fruit from the shed.

Loss explained her mother gave up the pageant because it got to be too much for one person to manage. Not just the competition but also all the events to attend, the sponsorship money to hustle, and the outfits to order. 

“I talked to Greg Gude and I was like, ‘Hey, what do you think about bringing Miss Kumquat back?’ And he’s like, ‘Absolutely.’ So last year was my first group of girls and this is my second.” 

“Where did you get their crowns?”

“I ordered them online. What’s great is you can buy them in bulk and they do matching sets.”

Tiny Miss, whose name is Melanie Hermon, finished her crayon drawing. The 5-year-old handed it to her mother and marched off with the other girls and boys for a photo session on the courthouse lawn. Dressed in bell-bottom jeans and leopard-print cowboy boots, her fawn-brown hair tangled in a tiny tiara. 

“Is this her first pageant?” I asked. 

Her mother, Jamie, shook her head no. 

“We entered her in a different one last year and then she asked every weekend if there was a pageant, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ So then when we heard about this one, she was all excited.”

“Do you think you’ll do it again?”

“Melanie gave a speech during the pageant and we still hear it every day. She loves to be onstage.” 

“Some people have that talent,” I said.

Rising to follow her daughter, Hermon grabbed up a backpack.

“Yeah. I’m not one for the stage, but she’s the polar opposite. She loves it. The bigger the crowd, the more excited she is, and I’m like, ‘Oh, not me.’”

Courtney Loss buttonholed the mayor, James D. Shive, as he stepped out of the courthouse to greet festival goers. He wore running shorts and a creamsicle-orange shirt pinned with an official name tag that read “Proud Heritage, Promising Future.”

“Hi, Mr. Shive.”

“How are you?” he said, shaking her hand. “Good to see y’all. What beautiful young ladies.”

The mayor bent over Baby Miss, toddling perilously toward the edge of a bench.

“What a prime example here,” he said.

Shive looked up again as Loss threw her pitch.

“We want to look into what we have to do to start a kumquat parade. Like on Friday night?”

The mayor nodded along. He probably nodded along a lot. 

“The open house out at Kumquat Growers ends at three, so a five-thirty or six o’clock kind of thing. And maybe it could grow, but something that would be an extra showcase.” 

Shive’s assistant appeared, hovering. 

“We’ll get with you,” he said vaguely, waving to the pageant parents. 

Florida has a long history of citrus parades. And counter-parades. During the late 1980s, the Queen Kumquat Sashay in Orlando was billed as the “Parade for People Who Would Not Be Permitted in Any Other Parade.” It was a tribute to the absurd and the raunchy. The first grand marshal was a 2.4-inch Madagascar hissing cockroach. Off-duty Walt Disney World musicians formed the World’s Worst Marching Band while dancers from Thee Dollhouse, a strip club on Orange Blossom Trail, threw condoms to the crowd from the back of a pickup truck. Other parade marchers tossed kumquats, only to have the little bombs thrown back at them. Any woman with red hair — drag queens welcome — could be crowned Kumquat Queen if they showed up when the parade began. Festival founder Bob Morris was blindfolded, as the redheads surrounded him, and in a twisted version of “pin the tail,” a random winner would be whisked away in a kumquat-orange VW Karmann Ghia.

Perhaps Dade City could bring the joy to its kumquat parade as well.

rapture: the winged queen and her mate, quantum
passion spiraling near the kumquat,
and then the queen sheds her wings, plants
the pearl-like larvae in their cribs

—Joanie V. Mackowski, “Ants,” 2000

On the way out of Dade City, I stopped back at Kumquat Growers one last time to buy a pie for friends living down the coast. The road quickly emptied of traffic and solitary cows grazed on bales of hay. As usual, I managed to park in the exact wrong spot and stepped on a fire ant whose sisters took their revenge on my bare ankles. Greg Gude had told me he loves fire ants, because they will take down pesky insects looking to invade his grove, so I guess it was my own fault for not wearing sturdier shoes.

Fanchone Gude stood alone in the gift shop, restocking shelves with kumquat honey and hot sauce. She sold me a pie and gave me a bag of ripe Nagamis to take home as well. As she picked up a “Buy Fresh” sign, Edward “Ed” Blommel, a regional director for the Florida Department of Agriculture, walked in. Gude knows him as Eddie, because naturally, he grew up around the corner. “You know how you’re introduced to someone and you call them something for the rest of their life?” she laughed.

They chatted about bingo nights and spaghetti dinners at Saint Mary’s Episcopal. Then Blommel pulled a gold coin out of his pocket and handed it to her.

“You all are a credit to the state of Florida,” he said.

Gude blushed.

On one side, the coin depicted a grove of citrus under a rising run. The flip side was embossed with the Office of Agricultural Law Enforcement seal. “The commissioner has this challenge coin,” Blommel said. “It’s for people in agriculture. And the challenge is that we want them to stay in agriculture.”

“Greg has always wanted one of these,” Gude said. “Our granddaughter already got one.”

 “And now so do you.”

“He’s going to be so jealous.”

Blommel grinned and gave her a second one. 

“Give me a call about bingo. We never win, but Libby and I love to play.”

Several hours later, Greg Gude parked his truck behind the packinghouse, where his wife found him rummaging between the front seats, frazzled after a long day.

“Fanchone, did you see where my gun is at? I can’t find it,” he said.

She looked startled, glanced at me, then shrugged. “We’ve been through a lot this year,” she said.

Gude sighed after discovering his weapon had slipped underneath the cup holder. He stuffed the holster in the back waistband of his pants and pulled his shirt over it. 

“Eddie Blommel was here, and he missed you,” she said.

“Sorry about that.”

“But he left you this.”

She handed him the challenge coin, and her husband held it gingerly in his palm, pride rolling across his tired face.

“Oh wow. Just . . . just wow.”

Kumquat, def.
A young individual who goes through life
constantly disappointing people
with his/her infinite failures.

—Urban Dictionary, 2012

A few years ago, I realized sweets were no longer as tempting as that ice cream cone in the back of my great-aunt’s Cadillac. I could push past the racks of candy bars at supermarket checkout lines, stop ordering desserts at restaurants, and give up soda. OK, that’s a lie, because Coke and boiled peanuts. For whatever reason, the bitter center of kumquats appealed more than the sweet peel.

After returning home from Florida, I pickled the Gudes’ always-blooming Nagamis. Maybe it’s an aging palate. Or just age. I’ve nearly hit that same stage of life as Aunt Kat when she drove us to Nashville to see the Grand Ole Opry perform at the Ryman Auditorium, and bought me a pretty turquoise ring shaped like a flower at a cheesy trading post in Gatlinburg. My Nana was convinced that cheap silver ring would fall apart, and for the rest of the trip I held my thumb down on the petals for fear they would pop out of their setting. I still have that ring, all these years later, and hope to forever.  ◊

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