Summer Fruit

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old time is still a flying / This same flower that smiles today / Tomorrow will be dying.

                                                                                                                Thank you, Robert Herrick

Why wait till June 21^st ? Summer’s lease is short enough. Those plump and squishy fruits are calling. Yes, and virgins too as Herrick intended.

Round and juicy, from blueberries and grapes to apricots, peaches, plums and nectarines. Marble-small to nearly baseballs to basketballs of melons. 

There are apricots like succulent golf balls. Have two, they’re small. Your teeth and tongue will rejoice. But first behold their color. Such beauty is to be savored.  

Here are the plums from blood-red to purple to bursting. Plums are poems in the hands of William Carlos Williams. His is called: This Is Just to Say

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox / And which you were probably saving for breakfast / Forgive me, they were delicious, so sweet and so cold.

No ideas but in things, Williams declared and here it is, a no-fooling image, sensual, immediate and plain-spoken. There’s no denying that cold and fleshy fruit. Satsuma or Santa Rosa, all the better that it is forbidden. I bought mine at Costco, a dozen of them. There’s an art to this I’m willing to share. Eat one while on the longest line you can find. You have nowhere to go anyway. Try selling some to the person in front or behind. Better yet, make them a gift since they’re having a birthday this year. Offer some to your neighbor. There’s no time to waste before they turn into prunes.

Melons are all about communing with that life teeming inside. Are you ripe, I ask? If they don’t answer for three days, make that incision and go for a quadrant or sextant. You will discover the morning sun in a cantaloupe. Watermelons are for diving into and slurping yourself in that red sea, pits and all. Honeydew tastes like dew that’s been honeyed.

Peaches are the subject of songs and poems. As John Prine sang…. Blow up your TV / Throw your paper / Go to the country / Plant a little garden / Eat a lot of peaches / Try and find Jesus on your own. 

It could be a Come-to-Jesus moment for some. Times a wasting and peach trees are sagging. So luscious, fuzzy and plump. From Freestone to Babcock to Clings. Let it slurp. Cezanne used peaches in his still-life to capture light. T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock had to ask, Dare I eat a peach? Not unexpected from a man who measured his life with coffee spoons and heard the mermaids singing each to each, but not to him. To bite into peachy skin is to hear mermaids sing. Let it drip. It’s all we have in this land of sticks and stones, parched of our precepts, going from grape to raisin.