Hanging Jewels

The rough-barked branches of my apricot tree are heavy with green fruit this time of year. But the spring Santa Anas have done their job, fierce gusts dispersing seeds of date palm and oak. I stalk around the yard, gathering the potpourri of dead bougainvillea blossoms and picking up a few fallen baby apricots.

In the kitchen, I put the velvet-green apricots on the windowsill and notice the last pomegranate, shriveled and forgotten. I remember the late winter day we got it. On the street, stark black branches were naked from cold winds, but the red globes of pomegranates hung heavy. To the neighbor who brought us the bag, these fruits were nothing more than a bother. I sat on the porch with my youngest daughter, 6-year-old Rosette, holding it: dull, cracking, leathery-skinned. Like the earth in winter. But then I showed her how to pry open the tough covering, and she gasped. The ruby jewels glistened inside their waxy yellow compartments. I showed Rosette how to nudge the seeds from their companionable rows, and she popped one into her mouth. So did I. They burst tart and sweet, a tiny rivulet of juice that made us want more. We spit seeds into the dirt near the steps, where over many years, watermelon and nectarine and apricot seeds have sprouted volunteers.

When my husband and I bought this old farmhouse, in a neighborhood of wooden bungalows built on a former citrus grove, we knew nothing about the trees. But a few weeks later, the apricot tree outside our bedroom window began to flower, and then bud. By May, the dark-orange fruit lined each branch in almost military precision. An elderly woman next door told me that the former owner, who was 95, had put up 22 quarts of apricot preserves the previous year. I got out a bag and began to pick as she eyed me. I had a full-time teaching job, was pregnant, and didn’t really want to climb a tree. But I had a Swiss mother with a big-time love for fruit and California. Almost every morning of my childhood, she greeted us with a quartered orange.

Rosette and I studied the mysteries and joys of the pomegranate until near dark, popping the kernels with our teeth and tongues. Neighbors noticed Rosette’s crimson-stained fingers with fond remembrance. Nobody eats fruit like that anymore, someone said.

It’s true. Our kids eat fruit snacks, jellied shapes of sharks and bears made with some fruit juice and lots of food coloring. They eat fruit roll-ups, cups of canned peaches, yogurt-covered raisins and Fig Newtons--all safely processed. The first time my eldest niece saw fruit on trees, she was stunned. She thought fruit magically collected itself in neat rows at the market: kiwi from New Zealand, mangoes from Brazil, red grapes from Chile all winter, Granny Smith apples from South Africa and Red Delicious from Washington state. She had never grabbed something off a branch and put it in her mouth. The art of eating fruit just picked--no alterations made in the kitchen, no dolling up with spices or mashing into cookies--is disappearing, especially among children.

Fifteen years ago, that first time I tasted the apricots from my tree, I was shocked. Densely sweet, tart and firm, they were not the paler, plumper versions in the store. Later that summer, with a new baby in the house, I watched blackbirds fight in the two ancient fig trees outside our daughter’s room, one heavy with purplish Brown Turkey figs, the other with huge yellow-green Kadota figs. I ate a few, but I didn’t know what to do with them. Then one hot afternoon, I heard two elderly neighbors who assumed I wasn’t home talking in my backyard. They were picking figs, and I listened through my window screen as they marveled at the crop and belittled me for not using this valuable fruit. “That young girl probably doesn’t know what to do with it--letting it all go to waste,” one of them clucked.

I discovered that they dried some figs on backyard screens and preserved whole figs in clove-spiced syrup. I didn’t like the taste of either of those, and the backyard began to smell like fermenting wine. Then Selma, the fig lady, knocked tentatively on my door.

She was Armenian. Her family had scattered to Lebanon and then relocated to a tiny house down my street. Selma had seen my fig tree from the sidewalk. She nearly cried over the figs’ beauty, and I picked bags for her every year after that, while she brought me baklava and a salad made of parsley, tomatoes and olive oil. “Habiba,” she would croon to my daughters, three of them by now, when she came in late summer for the harvest. “The fig lady!” they would shout.

I am divorced now, and my daughters are 13, 11 and 7. In spring, we all climb the brittle-barked apricot tree, and we eat handfuls of fruit on the porch. My mother and I make jam, give fruit to neighbors, and still there is too much. The girls sell apricots on our busy sidewalk. Most of the people who stop are Mexican or Armenian-born, and they speak with wonder about the taste of the apricots. They ask for seeds. In summer, we eat plums from Mike’s tree, down the street, and oranges from my brother’s grove. When I offer visiting kids fruit from the yard, they look puzzled at first. Tentatively, they touch the imperfect skin, take a bite, and frown or smile.

But in spring, I study the hundreds of swelling green apricots, and I sigh at the thought of harvest. Fruit trees are demanding. You have to water regularly, and when the fruit comes, yes, you must pick it then. For Americans my age, whose lives are full of long commutes, extra projects at work and household chores, this seems like too much work. I have felt this way, too, when I spend hours filling bags with nectarines for elderly neighbors, when I have to spend that particular weekend making jam with my mother and kids when I wanted to do something else. My neighbor felt that way in January, when he handed me the bag of pomegranates with a sigh of relief. A few more gone.

That afternoon, I studied the fallen transparent kernels around our feet. What is burden to some is bounty to others. The fruits of Southern California are biblical, I was thinking. We share the same landscape as Judea, the same trees that thrive in this heat: fig, apricot, pomegranate. When Rosette and I opened the pomegranate and saw the rubies inside, I let myself remember that, elsewhere, food is treasure, fruit is priceless. That day, our chores undone, our hands stained, we ate pomegranates, seed by jewel-like seed.