In the back yard of the house where I grew up were two trees of particular importance. One was the tree that my parents planted when I was born. I always wonder if I will feel a twinge of pain when someone cuts it down even though I am hundreds of miles from it. For all I know, though, it is still standing. It was one of the first trees that I learned how to climb. Though in the summer I had to learn to avoid stinging caterpillars. They would lumber and curl along the branches, their spiny spikes wobbling back and forth. Usually when you stepped on them they would curl up and leave a ring of black specks on your foot. I don’t remember the pain being terrible but there was something shocking about it. Of course, being little I squished a fair share of them when I wore shoes (which was either childish heroism or mature cowardice). They bled brilliant green and yellow guts.
Worms, slugs, caterpillars, cockroaches. These were the strange creatures that I grew up with, learning a kind of measured co-existence with them. I really did detest cockroaches. My dad would usually kill them with the worn soft padded bottom of his house shoes.
The other tree of importance was the pear tree. It didn’t grow delicious sweet pears shaped like pretty women. It grew round hard acidic pears (I won't say whether there are women like this or not). My mom always called them “baking pears,” trying to be excessively polite about them. There were always a horde of old women, white and black, any color but always old, who would bring their Winn-Dixie grocery sacks and troll our yard for these abominations. For as far as I was concerned what good was something that came from the bosom of nature if you couldn’t eat it hand to mouth in the passion of the moment. These pears required a kind of tolerance, patience, and foresight that I could neither comprehend nor value at the time.
But these old women knew secrets about this strange fruit. They knew how to boil the hard pears with sugar and can them. I guess they had had to eat worse things at some point in their lives (and in the South where most things are touched with pig fat the guess is a good one). I can look back on it now and see something almost profound, even melancholy in these old women half-stooped collecting this fruit. There was a time when that kind of hand to mouth existence would see you through slim times, when a woman’s resourcefulness was all that kept you from teetering into the void.
I had to pick up the rotten fruit that was left over, turning over wounded faces from the grass, plucking them up, and dropping in a mass grave at the bottom of a grocery sack. Summer after summer I was sent into the yard to deal with those pears that had fallen only to pass from this world.
More recently, I recall the pecans from the neighbor’s pecan tree that I used to eat. I worry that I have told more than one person this story more than once. The lesson learned from the years of biting into rotten bitter pecans only to be rewarded by the most gorgeous flavor you can imagine from the ripe ones is an instructive one.
I always envied (and still do envy) people whose yards contain flourishing fruit trees or vegetable gardens. I am afraid that I am a terrible bore to take to a botanical garden. Ask my wife. I will spend hours strolling through the velvety growths of flowers with a perfectly non-plussed look on my face only to light up at the sight of the vegetable gardens. I always want to see the largest specimens of cauliflower, pumpkins, and so on. I enjoy the sight of well ordered apple and orange trees thrown into a disorderly riot by the heavy burden of sweet fruit.
The envy that I feel towards people who have such flourishing resources at their disposal resembles the envy that I feel towards people who own boats. These possessions mark these people as living apart from the world that I knew. The people with their fruits and veggies were imminently resourceful and prodigiously natural. The people with their boats knew something very profound about leisure and enjoyment. Here we have the two basic poles of existence, the pure struggle of life. Yet each pole always seemed like the lucky tendency of other families that I came in contact with outside of the terrain I grew up in, and only touched in a moment to see left behind in fading light.
