News flash: If you already thought avocado toast was expensive, brace yourself: It’s going to get even pricier, because avocado prices are rising again. Why? Read on.

Madam Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, president of Mexico, just warned Donald J. Trump that if he slaps a tariff on imports from Mexico, she will do the same.

I think that this lady is not kidding. Women with a name and title like hers have thin senses of humor. Especially when dealing with a gringo like El Donald.

I have been really lucky to have known a number of Hispanic dancers, artists, actors and writers, mostly ladies, I confess, in my short life, from all the countries south of Florida.

Most of them took life and words seriously, especially from flirtatious handsome young actors. Madam president would have not have been on my dance card in my day, but I get the feeling that she is a woman who won’t be sharing a Big Mac with the golden haired “Americano” any time soon. The time will come when he will drop his Diet Coke and stutter, and she will be waiting for that moment.

I don’t know the lady, but I can tell that she’s not the type who dips chips in guacamole and licks her fingers.

In my life, I have known many ladies of Latin blood and remember them fondly.

A story: In my life, there was an actor, Rita, who stood next to me in the wings every night in the Off-Broadway cast of Federico García Lorca’s “Blood Wedding” and gave me a kiss before going on. Gracias Rita.

I would think about her now and then, quietly of course, in our gorgeous Spanish home in Hancock Park, a quiet neighborhood in the City of Angels, with 40 rose bushes, two grapefruit trees and a lemon tree full of wild parrots, all cared for by our Mexican gardener, Juan. We inherited Juan, a gentle man of 80, from the previous owners.

This is where I first came upon the mysterious fruit we know as the avocado.

Our next door neighbor, a quiet lady, owned a huge avocado tree that leaned over the white stone wall into our garden.

For the first year it routinely dropped a constant dark green rain of big avocados into our yard.

Now, as a boy from St. Louis, I had never tasted an avocado, so I asked our aging Mexican Juan to whisk them away.

This serious gentleman looked at this crazy gringo with a smile.

“Mr. Devine. May I keep them?”

“Of course,” I answered. What would I want, I thought, with hundreds of avocados?

So Juan and his sons spent the next three years raking avocados up in our garden and carting them away.

Now this humble little fruit, a berry, actually, has quite a history.

Avocados are related to bay leaves and cinnamon, two ingredients that sit on my shelves. Imagine.

Time slips by us gently, does it not? Through the gentle summer evenings, She and I sat in our favorite Mexican cafes dipping blue corn chips into giant bowls of green guacamole.

She would often remind me of Juan’s sons, who made a living selling our discarded avocados at traffic stops all over L.A.

When our waitresses asked us, in Spanish (which my beloved taught), what we wanted next, with a smile She replied, “More guacamole, por favor?”

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.