On Fruit

I'm back in Brookline now, away from the overburdened pear tree. When I was in VT it was so easy to eat five or six pears a day. It sort of became a habit. You could just pick one up off the ground and eat it. If it had bruises from falling off the tree you just eat around them, throw the rest into the woods and pick up another one. Or else if you saw a ripe one still on the tree you could just go for it. Then you could have the fun of hunting for another ripe one on the tree.

It made me realize that ordinarily I kind of ration fruit. In fact I've been carrying around mixed feelings about fruit and I didn't know it.

There are a few difficulties with fruit if you don't produce it yourself. Fruit is precious. Normally fruit is kind of expensive. You buy it at the store and you have to get it home without squashing it. If you don't eat it promptly it rots and then you feel guilty. Also, it's good for you (of course it's good for you whether you grow it or buy it) and sometimes I'm childish enough to let that dissuade me from thinking of fruit as a treat.

"Cookie or fruit? Cookie or fruit? Cookie bad! Fruit good! Cookie!!!"

I do think of fruit as a treat despite myself. I would never eat three store bought fruit objects at a go. That would be extravagant. If I bought them at the store I'd probably have bought six at the most and if I ate three at once they'd be almost gone. That would be a waste of resources. So instead I parcel them out, one a day or so.

Then there's the hoarder's backlash that kicks in: if I eat them all then they'll be gone and I won't have any more so sometimes I put off eating the last one until it's almost too late. The last of a package of grapes always become raisins in the back of my fridge.

Sometimes I just skip buying fruit altogether because I tell myself "it'll just end up rotting anyway" all because I can't bear for it to be all gone. How twisted is that?

Now I can afford to eat fruit just like a pig. It would be more of a waste not to eat as much as I want at a time.

So can our abundance of pears get me to change my ways? Knowing me I doubt it. My fruit habits are at least thirty-five years ingrained. I'll probably forget about this epiphany once the pears are gone and go back to my fruit hoarding ways.

In the mean-time Pete picked probably hundreds of pears off the tree yesterday while we prepared to leave VT. The pear bonanza continues for now. I"m going to look into canning and put up some preserves. I might even have time to do that before they all rot since most of them are still green. Fun - a new skill to learn!