Maypops

Maypops

So, when I was younger, I used to grab the closest kids next to me and go ‘xplorin’ through the nearby woods. Typically, we would find ourselves in the middle of nowhere, without much resources to call or contact our parents–before cell phones and the such. So, our lost status gave us plenty of time to plan our next moves.

Like eating maypops.

Maypops, or Purple Passionflower, if you’ve never heard of them were first discovered by Spanish explorers in  Florida in 1529. The shape of the blossom captured their imagination and they described it as a symbol for the “Passion of Christ. Of course, we didn’t think anything about any Spanish explorers back then, we called them maypops probably from some elder who thought the same as us.

ghetto fruit.

See, in the ghetto, the term maypop means essentially the lowest of the lowest class of a thing or two. Essentially, if your momma couldn’t afford Jordans for you, she went out and bought you some T949’s from K-Mart. Essentially, making you a number one candidate for having some maypops as shoes.

Getting back to the story, we ended up finding a field of maypops and devoured as much as we could in our lost status. And without question, we would find our way home every time we did that. Maypops may be ghetto, but before GPS, all we had were maypops to get us to the most important destination we knew at the time.

home.

M.C. Davis

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