Hello February—proof that the year is well on it’s journey and I should be too. I should be all done with all the good things I should be accomplishing this year right?
Well.
This healthy eating sites now, they not only nag me to eat pyramid-style, but they have a thing: 5 a day! Eat five fruit and vegetables a day!
I am good friends with vegetables. I can deal with a vegetable. I will buy and eat them, canned frozen or fresh. If I buy too much fresh broccoli, as I have done once or twice when it was on sale, I will do my best to eat it. But if I can’t, out it goes. Wilted broccoli can go out with the trash and I can live with myself.
But the fruit…fruit is complicated.
Fruit is delicious and beautiful. It look and smells and tastes so voluptuous. It came from flowers, and that gorgeousness lives on.
Every year during peach season I am jerked up on a line passing the display in the store. That smell! I will stop and gently squeeze a few to make my selection. I will take the bag home and arrange them. Not the fridge for these beauties. I want to see them and have the fragrance waft.
But I often will not eat them. Because they are too beautiful. They should be approached at just the right time. And I falter.
Sometimes. And sometimes I hang back and they rot. I am sad about that. I feel guilty. Fruit is so fragile. Strawberries, melons, peaches and cherries.
The more accessible fruits we know. Bananas, requiring violent tearing of the peel. As a fruit they are very bland, and their mortality is very advertised. It is quick and blaring. Spot! SPOTS! NOW! EAT ME! HURRY!! So we do.
Apples are so tough, juicy wood-fruit of the tree they come from. They slice and snap. Also friendly. Cooked and juiced, apples are homey.
Oranges come in a kit, in a self-protecting wrapper that keeps them safe for so long. They can be tossed around a room in a game and be eaten with pleasure. Remove packaging, disassemble and share.
Of course these are the popular fruits.
But many fruits are fecund females that demand to be respected. And berries!
These pregnant keepers of past and future know that ritual and ceremony surround their gathering and consumption. Strawberries are everywhere, but I have learned when I travel to look at the jam section of the grocery store. There will be jam of berries I have never known.
In our world of homogeneity, what a luxury to find an undiscovered flavor!
The ephemeral ones, the hard to capture, the soft eureka lemon, the wild blackberry and the just-ripe peach are what I should fill my life with.
I have to find more courage and stop being intimidated by my fruit.