Seven-Fruit Salad -- The Cookout Side That Showed Up (Even When I Didn’t Have Much Left)

Spring in San Diego — basically February in the rest of the country. Pre-deployment workups have been ramping up. Ryan was gone Wednesday through Friday for a field exercise.

Caleb, 7, wants to be a firefighter still. Has not deviated. Hazel, 4, chaos incarnate. Put a peanut butter sandwich in the DVD player Wednesday. Showed zero remorse.

Pasta salad for the cookout. Italian dressing. Olives. The standard.

Megan called from D.C.. We talked twenty minutes. The relationship is better now than it was.

The week held. The casserole held. The kids ate.

Reading another military memoir at night. They make Ryan tense. They steady me. We negotiate. He doesn't ask what I'm reading. I don't tell him. The arrangement works.

Base housing is base housing. Beige walls, beige carpet, beige expectations. The dryer venting is in a stupid place. The kitchen has no dishwasher. We make it work.

Donna sent a recipe card in the mail this week. She has been doing this for years. The recipes go in the binder. The binder is full. The newest one is for a green bean casserole that uses fresh green beans and fried shallots and which I will absolutely make for the next holiday.

I unpacked another box from storage Tuesday afternoon. Three years on this base and I am still finding things I packed in Twentynine Palms. Military-wife archeology — every box is a layer of geological history. I found a ceramic dish from Lejeune still wrapped in newspaper from 2020.

The Friday before-school morning was chaos. Three kids, two backpacks, one missing shoe. We all made it to the bus. I drank cold coffee at nine AM because that's when I sat down. Standard.

I went to the commissary Saturday morning. Got the grocery haul under sixty bucks for the week, which is a small victory. The cashier knows me. We talked about her grandkids while she scanned the chicken thighs and the family-size box of pasta. Small-town energy on a Marine base in California.

I sat at the kitchen table Tuesday night writing in the journal. Volume 10 now. The handwriting has not gotten neater. The journals are a record of the life I am living, in the moment, in tiny script that I will look back on someday and not be able to read. That is okay. The writing was the thing.

My therapy session was Tuesday. We talked about the deployment cycle and the way the body holds dread and the ways the body holds it. The hour passed. The work continues. I have been doing this work for years. The work pays.

The PCS rumors are starting again. The official orders will come in a few months. We could move. We could stay. The waiting is the worst part. Three years here and I have learned to not put down deep roots in any military town. Nineteen-year-old me would not have believed how good I have gotten at packing.

I went for a walk Sunday morning before the kids got up. Half an hour. The fog was burning off. I needed it. Some weeks I get the walk in. Some weeks I don't. The week tells me which.

The kitchen counter has a chip in it from someone before us. Some military housing thing. I have stopped asking what. The chip is fine. The whole kitchen is provisional. We are renting from Uncle Sam.

I made a casserole for a neighbor whose husband is deployed. I dropped it off. She cried. I told her, eat the casserole, baby. The food is the saying. The casserole was a mostly-frozen tater-tot situation that took fifteen minutes of effort and six months of practice to perfect.

The pasta salad made it to the cookout, but honestly, the fruit salad is the one I keep coming back to — because some weeks the fridge has more fruit in it than anything else, and a bowl of something colorful and cold feels like a small act of optimism. Donna’s recipe cards live in the binder, but this one lives in my head now. When the commissary haul came in under sixty dollars and there was still a pile of fruit on the counter, this is what I made.

Seven-Fruit Salad

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 0 min | Total Time: 15 min | Servings: 8

Ingredients

• 1 cup fresh strawberries, hulled and sliced
• 1 cup fresh blueberries
• 1 cup seedless grapes, halved
• 1 cup fresh pineapple chunks
• 1 cup cantaloupe, cubed
• 2 kiwis, peeled and sliced
• 1 cup mandarin orange segments (fresh or canned in juice, drained)
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
• 1/4 teaspoon lime zest
• Fresh mint leaves for garnish (optional)

Instructions

1. Make the dressing. In a small bowl, whisk together honey, lime juice, and lime zest until combined. Set aside.
2. Prep the fruit. Hull and slice strawberries, halve grapes, cube cantaloupe and pineapple, peel and slice kiwis, and drain mandarin segments if using canned.
3. Combine. Add all prepared fruit to a large serving bowl and gently toss to mix.
4. Dress the salad. Drizzle the honey-lime dressing over the fruit and toss gently to coat without bruising the softer fruits.
5. Chill and serve. Serve immediately or refrigerate for up to 2 hours before serving. Garnish with fresh mint if desired.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 85 | Protein: 1g | Fat: 0g | Carbs: 22g | Fiber: 2g | Sodium: 5mg