Ellington

"I'm not making fruit salad!" my mother affirmed -- more than once -- as Christmas approached. She gleaned the fruit salad recipe from my dad's grandpa years ago. No one can quite figure out why, in a family of several dozen, he only gave the recipe to her. After two decades of moving that sweet homemade whipped cream, mandarin orange and other fruit concoction around my mouth, I could guess it well enough. But she is the only person who can make it just right.

But last year, she decided not to make it.

Only two weeks before Thanksgiving, my younger brother had been deployed to Iraq. Dustin, a then-20 year old military police officer in the Army, had told my mom to celebrate holidays as usual, but she refused.

"But Dustin said we could have it!" I said back to her. I'd been craving the fruit salad for a year, and as much as I missed my brother, I was ready for a couple of bowlfuls.

"Then you make it," she said. "I just can't do it."

It took several months to begin to understand the magnitude of what my brother must be seeing in Iraq. In September, I traveled with New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas D. Kristof to Africa for two weeks. Working in Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, I covered AIDS, maternal mortality, poverty and governance issues through blogs and video reports. When Dustin watched a video of me during watching a fistula surgery in Bangui, Central African Republic, (a surgery I left for a bit because of my weak stomach), he wrote to me, "If you think that's gross, you would have probably passed out from what I saw yesterday."

What has my brother seen? He won't talk about it much ("Those aren't the kinds of things you want your family to know about," he tells me.), but a year ago, I really had no idea. I was thinking about the fruit salad.

For weeks we talked about it. Then, Christmas Eve. Without any comment, my mother just made the fruit salad. There was no event, no special tastes or sneaking of mandarin oranges, just a chore of mixing.

Christmas Eve used to be the only night of the year I let my brother sleep in my room. He was always a little afraid of the dark, so he begged me all year long to let him sleep in my room. On Christmas Eve, I consented. We'd watch "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and stay awake for most of the night giggling or giving hints about presents. We'd sleep for the bare minimum of hours then blast into our parents' room, hungry for our presents.

So when Christmas Eve came, suddenly the fruit salad didn't so delicious anymore. I tried to eat a bowl of it, but all I could think of was my little brother -- the one who hadn't wanted to sleep alone -- now serving in Iraq under God knows what darknesses.

Tomorrow, my baby brother returns to his base in Fort Drum, NY, after a year in Iraq. For Christmas, he has two weeks of leave. Presents and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" don't seem so important even more. Not even the fruit salad weighs too heavily on my mind. I'd let him sleep in my room, but he's a man now -- sharpened and shaped and ?? (I'm not sure what else) by the military and a year at war.