Further up and Further in

Lisa and I were walking from our quarters to the school last week and saw this jackfruit tree with its enormous near-ripe jackfruit and we were shocked that we hadn't noticed it before. Jackfruit was something we both ate on occasion in Brazil (jaca)...we'll see how it compares. They have jackfruit chips here, which I imagine we'll sample at some point.




I think God must have created jackfruit just to stir things up a bit. Why not create some fruit that's ridiculously enormous? Bigger than La Bamba's bigger-than-your-head burritos? Reminds me of Lisa's story about the pig that ate the horse. Maybe she'll tell it.

i swear these things were called 'stinkyfruit' in taiwan. Because they really did stink, regardless of what you say about freshness and whatnot...

tell the pig story risa!!

When the famous poet Galway Kinnell came to give a reading at BYU, my friend Becky and I skipped class to go to the reading, and he was telling about the last time he'd visited Utah. Mr. Kinnell is very fond of pigs, you see, and many of his poems are about pigs, and he himself raises pigs on his farm in Vermont. Well, in Utah he met a farmer who told him the story of a horse who had died and whose bloated body had been thrown into the stye of a li'l pig. Well, the pig began eating the horse, and he ate and he ate until he burst his li'l pig stomach and died, poor piggy. After hearing the story of the gluttunous li'l pig, Mr. Kinnell was quite distraught, until he lighted upon the thought that the poor li'l pig had been trained his whole life to eat everything that had been thrown to him. And, perhaps, he felt duty-bound to eat the entire horse. And he died in the line of what he considered to be his duty as a pig. "And that," said Mr. Kinnell, "was how I was able to forgive the pig."