The most beautiful things in Ghana are green oranges: as pale and dimpled as hedge apples from an Osage Orange and oblong, as if shaped by hand.

When I walk home in the evenings, I pass the girls selling green oranges at wooden tables along the road, each arranging twelve of her best on the branches of a candelabra fruit stand.

There is no dusk here; there is only day and night, and when the pink Harmattan sun sets, the whole world goes black. In the city, I am supposed to be home before dark, but I often forget. By the time I walk home, each girl is lighting a little sterno can at her wooden table and the streetside is an aisle of musky flares.

Ten pesewa in my hand is light and dull; I could bend the coin if I bit down on it. But the oranges it buys are perfect: four heavy globes, solid in the black plastic sack, with one more sliding in as a gift from the girl behind the table. She smiles shyly and plucks it from the crown of the candelabra; it must be special.

And yet the way she smiles, I feel so alone: not a woman buying fruit but a woman who is white and alone and walking on the road with money enough for five more sacks of oranges, which I buy for the children in the home where I live. In Ghana, the question is not: do you have children, but: how many children do you have? When I leave them for a whole day, I try to bring a present, some token, proof of regret for being gone so long.

The children taught me how to eat a green orange: to hold it to your lips, suck the nectar from a cut at its top, and squeeze the fruit soft. When you peer into its crumpled skin, all that is left is a fleshy web, a fragrant piece of rubbish. They forget it, toss it to the ground, press their sticky cheeks and hands to you and call you “Ma.”

Even those who are not small will try to curl up in your arms, not because they love you but because you are here. When I feel myself begin to love one better than the rest I stop holding him or her; I stand away.

I pass the last of the girls and the crude flicker of their lamps. It is dark and I am walking beneath the trees whose branches, in the day, are hung with a weaver’s swaying, ample baskets. Remembering them, I think of reeds and bulrushes, a river, the baby followed and found.

Before I came here, I knew the question that would be asked of me and taught myself to say: “I had one child, and I lost it.” I hate to say it, but I would hate worse to say: “None.” I take the bags all in one hand and with the other, I bring an orange to my face and smell it, rub my lips against.

The most beautiful thing about green oranges is their fragrance. The first day I caught it, I was sure the scent came from an unseen flower blooming just beyond the roadside ditch. I once heard a sermon in which God was likened to a woman walking through a room, leaving a waft of expensive perfume. The scent of this orange, its top just cut to show a glistening, fecund slice of flesh, is the perfume I think that woman wears.

It makes me giddy and hungry; it makes this sorrow wheel.