Most of us grow fruits of some sort around here. It's not only a big time ag county with huge commercial groves, every home has a partially edible landscape. I nearly live off the land this time of year, just snatching the low hanging fruit as I pass through the neighborhood. I eat like a bull but can't pinch an inch.

The interesting bit, the thing worth posting about, is that it tastes soooo good. Today I raided Warren and Mary Lee's apricots. They were small and deceptively plain looking, but when you bite one there's a sweet, juicy explosion that stops you in your tracks.

If I came to your door with a bucket of these cots and tried to give them to you, you might well decline to take them. They don't look special. I see this all the time. Home fruit growers beg their friends and neighbors to take some before the birds get them all or they drop and rot. People treat them like poverty food, like zucchini, something you'd only take if you had no other options. They go to the store and buy pretty cardboard fruit, apparently never suspecting that they were eating poverty food, and paying for the privilege.

Right now I have plums. I made Warren and Mary Lee take some of them, the price they pay for me eating their cots. It's a sort of reverse market where you pay someone to eat your fruit by eating their fruit. Everybody has to do their fair share of munching. Shirkers who don't eat much have to go begging strangers to eat their fruit, like bums on street corners begging for spare change.

Everybody is glad to see me coming because I'll eat their fruit without them even having to ask. I just get to work, several times a day as I go about my rounds. My hands are sticky and my lips are discolored with various fruit juices. Bees and other insects follow me around.

Fruit is often served chilled, but I like it warm, fresh from the tree in the heat of the day. It really is an entirely different experience. It's so tender and flavorful, so juicy. There's no polite way to eat it since the juice goes everywhere. There's no way to do witty supper banter since your brain is overwhelmed with a taste rush. You have to just surrender to it for a while. It is the only subject for a time.

It has a strange calming effect on me. I have energy, but not the jaggies like you can get from some processed foods and drugs like caffeine. Part of that is surely the after glow of the pleasure of eating, but part of it is likely metabolic as well. I'm nourished, and I know it. A two fer. It's something like having sex with someone you love, but less so. Now if you could arrange to do both . . .

» Bounty from Mossback Farm
Back40 has a tasty description of his fruit filled neighborhood... "Home fruit growers beg their friends and neighbors to take some before the birds get them all or they drop and rot. People treat them like poverty food, like zucchini,......[read more]
Tracked: June 18, 2007 05:51 AM