I ate two bananas this morning

I ate two bananas this morning. They'd been in their plastic bag wrapped loosely in newspaper for a few days. When my friend first gave them to me he told me they're not ripe so I didn't open the bag for a couple of days. After two days one banana was kind of ripe. It was good, slightly mineraly the way some bananas are here. He had told me when I asked after the name of this strain, "these bananas don't give you any health problems." Well and good. I separated some stringy parts from the fruit like my young Fulbright friends Anna and Taryn tried to do last night when we were admonished by our host, "that's the best part. It helps with ulcers." OK. But I peeled and separated mine in secret because. I don't know. Who likes the stringy parts of a banana?

Back to my own bagful. I ate two a day for two or three days and dang if they weren't hard to separate the stringiness off of. But very good tasting and very nice texture. We don't have taste or texture like this in our bananas at home and we overlook here the humble treat of these or the kindness meant by giving a bag of them to a friend. 

Today had to be the last day. You can imagine how much I hate to throw these bananas out after they've been lovingly given. From trees right here in my friend's garden. And so not-health-problem inducing. So I steeled myself and took the last two bananas, slightly bruised, from the bottom of the bag. I was a little scared because already yesterday and the day before the bananas were breaking off from the stem. I didn't know what shape they'd be in today. 

One was kind of normal and one was soft to the touch. But there weren't fruit flies or anything around so I declared to self I will eat these. Strange surprise. Something I've never seen in a banana. Peeling them there was still the sticking-on stringiness, something I still tried to remove. But as I did that I realized the bananas were coming loose from the peel. There was no biting into these, only sticking the whole thing into your mouth. The strangest part is that these bananas had begun to deliquesce, melt in a way, and they turned out to be the most watery, juicy bananas I ever ate. The taste was utterly different today but the minerality remained, mixed now with the honey-moist sweetness of a fruit I never tasted before.