Fruit Thieves

Recently our neighbors watched a very interesting scene unfold in front of their house. They were sitting on their lanai drinking coffee when they saw a rental jeep pull over and a man hop out. The jeep was left running with the other passenger inside. The man hopped the rock wall into their orchard, and started climbing a papaya tree to get at the ripe orange fruit at the top.

It’s necessary to clarify some things about papaya trees at this point in the story. Papayas grow like weeds all over the island. The trees can grow very tall, very quickly, and produce fruit within a year. The trees have tall stalk-like trunks, with a clump of leaves at the very top and a cluster of fruit just beneath the leaves. They’re classified as herbs rather than trees, and, most importantly, their trunks are hollow and weak.

So, as the man started to climb, the trunk cracked and both he and the tree toppled onto the wall. He cried out, jumped up, scuttled back to the jeep and tore away as quickly as possible. Our neighbors, who’d witnessed this scene unfold in its entirety from their obscured lanai found this quick karmic-return very humorous. The moral of the story is simply to not steal fruit from people’s property; it’s not right, and it can be dangerous!