The Fool and his Fruit (Sandy)

Dear Sandy,

° How many years ago did I replant the old apple orchard to fireblight resistant dwarf Moonglow pears? More than 20.

° How many pears have I eaten off those trees? Less than 20. Perfectly timed blossomblackening frosts Spring after Spring followed by wet Mays, moderate Junes, droughty Julys, scarcely any fruit set, scarcely any matured.

° But this year, no frost, heavy set, extremely ample rain. Bushels and bushels of pears. They were just at that stage in which the stem snaps when bent, therefore capable of ripening to sweet mellow softness indoors, yet each fruit was still growing noticeably plumper from day to day--.

° And then the windstorm the other evening.

° Next morning, as I walked and sang through the garden, I noticed the ground and grass in the Orchard trampled and gored.

° Then I looked up.

° Naked as jaybirds, hardly three pears left on the trees. The ground equally gleaned, only a couple of halfgnawed hardasrock fruits.

° Bamber! He'd eaten Idon'tknowhowmany bushels during the night. I thought of Julja and her Frenchthrift after the chicken and guineahen massacre. I thought of my own Scottish ancestors (their thrift no doubt descended from the French sojourn of Mary Stuart), I thought how many months the family must've gone without pear conserve in those days before supermarkets, all because the gardener wasn't content with the girth of his fruit.

° I thought of 20odd years' wait.

° But mostly I thought of poor Bamber. What must've been the consequences of so much green fruit? Bellyache? Malignant scours? Cellulite?

° No, just sleek as a fattening pig this very morning; he stood there under the chestnuts, as he'd stood beneath the hazelnuts, as he'd stood beneath the pears, and listened spellbound to 'Casta Diva,' and waited for the spiky green husks to lighten, burst, and spill mealy white mast into his gullet.

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° Was it my greatgreatgrandparents who invented the Atkins Diet? Did it come into their FrancoScots minds that it mattered not whether they consumed all those bushels of pears as carbohydrate or as savoury, smoking fatandflesh?

° Giac