The Season When Fruit Consumes Us

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/t-magazine/chia-chia-lin-summer-fruit.html

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Summer brings with it a certain set of rites and rituals — and everyone’s are personal and unique. For our summer-long ode to the season, T has invited writers to share their own. Here, the writer Chia-Chia Lin describes the fruit blitz her family experiences every year.

My husband gorges on bursting plums over the sink — five or six at a time, several times a day. He’s trying his best to help me. Summer is a fraught time for both of us.

Crowded into our small backyard are seven fruit trees: apples, pears, three kinds of plums. The trees are old, their branches brittle, but they’re brazenly fertile in their golden years. If left unpicked, fruit will thud to the grass every minute or two, like a slow, hard pulse. I can’t stand the sound: the ruthless ticking, the reminder of what I haven’t accomplished. Overnight, raccoons will host bacchanals; in the morning, every fallen fruit will be missing exactly one bite, and there will be paw prints in the soft plums. The air smells of fermentation.

My discomfort with wastefulness is lodged deep, a vestigial organ. At night, when my desk work is done and my son is sleeping, I sweat over bubbling, spitting jams in the kitchen. Inside the oven are plum cobblers, apple pies, pear muffins, apple rings. Once, my hand-cranked apple peeler sent me to urgent care. It’s a frantic season, with deadlines dictated by the speed of decay. I give my homely creations away, but I know they might end up in the trash; everyone is trying to eat less sugar. We invite children over — they love plucking things from trees — but I worry about their hauls. Will they be tossed for blemishes? My poor, ugly, old-fashioned fruit. Sometimes I fantasize about the trendier Californian fruits, the persimmons and figs and pluots.

These months, I’m often on the ladder, harvesting. Through the leaves I have a view into neighbors’ yards. It’s the season of spying. The houses here are small and close; just a few feet off the ground, I can see five backyards. Our favorite neighbors are adding an extension — they have two adult sons who can’t move out, this being the Bay Area, and I watch as three generations of their family slowly hand-dig a new foundation and put up framing by themselves. Behind us, a young couple — newer to the neighborhood than we are — has torn out their yard to install garden beds. To make room for their chosen crops, they’ve cut down a plum tree.

Both my parents and in-laws have tried to move here, to a 700-square-foot house like ours, but their life savings and paid-off houses in other states are insufficient trade. Half this neighborhood is digging in, rooting itself deeper in order to stay. The other half — including me — plays a part in its “transition.” On the ladder, I’m eye-level with a thousand pounds of fruit. Soon it will rain down. I am living in abundance.

Community harvest organizations will pick your fruit and bring it to shelters, but I get the sense they’re overloaded. One website encourages me to share my bounty with friends and neighbors. “Consider preserving,” it says. In fact, I have. I’ve lost sleep over my canning methods and possible contamination. Every year, I revisit my anxieties about preserving fruit, preserving our yard, preserving our community, or at least not poisoning it. My husband scoops half a jar of jam onto his toast.

Planes fly very low here, and a train rattles our windows from a block away. Our lot, with its view of enormous, deafening vehicles, is a dreamland for my 1-year-old son. He is always outside. He drops sugar plums into his sand bucket. This summer, before I knew he could even climb, I turned around and saw him beaming on the highest rung of the ladder. He wobbled atop our paradise.

Chia-Chia Lin is the author of the novel “The Unpassing.”