Comfort food took on a whole new meaning for me this month.
I started waking up in the morning with dread in my belly and Dylan songs
running through my mind. “Ain't no use jiving.
Ain't no use joking…. Everything is broken.” Great he won the Nobel
Prize. Bad news that he was right, the world’s gone wrong.
How to start the day when you can’t bear to listen to the
radio, or read the paper or scroll through your Facebook feed? Better to go
outside and see what the birds are squawking about.
What a difference in the yard this season. Last year the
drought took out the coconut and mango trees we had planted, and starving deer
ate everything else they could reach. The sugar apple tree survived but many of
the fruits turned hard and black, mummified by fungus.
Now it is dripping like a rain forest out there and the
native trees are full of activity. Gray king birds and Zenaida doves are
picking the seeds out of the white caper pods, and scaly-naped pigeons have
harvested most of the black mampoo fruits and pigeon berries.
So I have sought solace in the garden with the birds and the
trees. Though vulnerable, as we all are, to coming storms, they are undisturbed by the news.
The sugar apple tree has been loaded with heavy ripening
fruit, and one night when the wind got going in the night we woke up to find
some of them dropped on the lawn like exploded custard grenades.
There is a delicate art to harvesting sugar apples. You want
to pick them before the pearly-eyed thrashers can get to them and hollow them
out. But if you pick them while they are too hard they may sit inside on the
counter in safety but not ripen properly, or at all. You need to leave them on
the tree until their sections start to separate, showing spaces in between that
look yellowish pink, and they feel just slightly soft to the touch. That can
take weeks. But slightly soft can turn squishy in just a few hours, and then
they let go and fall to the ground in a mess.
We found that the best approach was to give each sugar apple
a gentle squeeze every morning. My husband brought out the ladder and stationed
it next to the tree so we could easily reach up into the branches and feel each
fruit. If any were getting soft, we tried to remember to check them again at
dinner time.
Checking the sugar apples turned out to be both calming and engagingly competitive. It is difficult to
outsmart a thrasher, though this year they have been a bit less aggressive.
Maybe because there are also lots of other fruits and berries around.
When we planted the tree about 8 years ago, it was a gift
from my son and his girlfriend. I had never eaten a sugar apple. It is a
tropical tree, native to the West Indies, and the fruits don’t travel well (as
you can imagine from my harvesting challenges), so people from the north often
aren’t familiar with them.
Even if you found one in the market in New York, you
probably couldn’t properly appreciate it. In his last book, Wild Fruit, Thoreau
discussed the special pleasures of native fruits: “It is a grand fact that you
cannot make the fairer fruits or parts of fruits matters of commerce; that is,
you cannot buy the highest use and enjoyment of them. You cannot buy that
pleasure which it yields to him who truly plucks it.”
This year there were more sugar apples than ever, and too
many got ripe all at once. Instead of hoarding them as special treasures, I
have given them away, frozen a few, taken them to pot lucks – and still
greedily eaten as many of them as I could.
I usually break open the ripe sugar apple, delicately pull
out a juicy section and put it in my mouth, carefully extracting the seed and
saving it in a saucer. After the rainy night when the ripe ones fell and
smashed, I went out and collected all the fruit that had gotten suddenly
soft. There were sugar apples all over
the counter. I broke open one of the softest ones and held the whole thing up
to my mouth in a wonderful mess of drippy, joyful sweetness.
Grateful.
