The Fruit Season

We’re coming into the time of year that I love: fruit season.

I just came home from grocery shopping, and it was almost an overwhelming experience. The smell of ripe peaches stretched across aisles, pulling me right past the cookies without even a pause for temptation. A beautiful display of melons greeted me as well, half a dozen varieties laid out in neat rows like organic, geometric art.

I came home with a Crenshaw and sliced it up immediately. It’s so sweet and juicy. Lovely beyond reason.

I also brought home gorgeous organic strawberries and avocados. I wanted to bring home peaches and plumicots and nectarines as well, but there’s the small problem of eating all this bounty. I’ll go back for more in a couple days, when I’ve finished the melon and berries.

In the meantime, this feast of fruit made me think of when I was a kid in California. We had apricot and mulberry trees, and I spent many a summer morning and afternoon high in the branches, gobbling up sun warmed, perfectly ripened fruit.

To give the full picture, I must digress. We lived on the desert, so trees were precious. To grow the trees strong and healthy, my parents came up with a solution that sounds “green” now but was merely cost effective and sensible thirty years ago. They redirected water from the washing machine and used it to water the trees. We had a huge, black pvc-type hose that we moved from tree to tree, filling the wide, deep reservoir around every elm, cottonwood and mulberry.

Along with the trees, the wash-water made the grass grow as well, and we had a lovely little glade behind the house that was like an oasis in the desert: speckled with shade from the trees, lush with grass from all that carefully directed water.

And, we had horses. Specifically, I had a pony, at one time two. Peanuts and Goldie are the ones I remember the best.

When the mulberries ripened I would take my pony to the tree, drop the lead so that she could graze on deep grass, and stand on her back so that I could reach the higher branches where the larger, plumper berries waited. By then I’d stripped the bottom branches, and the birds had plundered the outer reaches, so the best berries were those that were sheltered between. Sometimes my best friend Leslie joined me, with her pony, and we feasted until our faces and hands turned purple.

When we moved to Northern Nevada, when I was 15, one of the first things my mom did was plant more mulberry trees. When we spoke last weekend she told me that she expects a bumper crop this year and is looking forward to lots of cobblers and jam.

Now, far away from California and Nevada, Gabi and I have a white mulberry tree in our yard and there’s a sweeter, more familiar purple variety on the empty lot next door. In years past we’ve never gotten much from the purple tree because our nephews and niece, who lived just behind the empty lot, would strip all the berries as soon as they hinted at pink. Perhaps because there were four of them competing for the berries on one small tree, they never waited until the berries were really ripe before picking them. And I, spoiled from growing up on plump, sweet berries so ripe they fell with the light touch of a single finger, never could bring myself to eat many of that tart, pink fruit.

But last year there was a separation and dislocation, and now our kids don’t live next door anymore. This morning I went to check on the tree to see what kind of gifts it would be giving us this year.

And I found that the tree has died. There’s not so much as a single leaf on those grey branches. And definitely no fruit.

Photo credits: I found both these images on Flickr. The lovely shot of a rainbow over Bell Mountain is by Y. Sky atwww.flickr.com/photos/ysky/389806234. And the equally lovely pic of mulberries is at www.flickr.com/photos/25454549@N03/2586274355