Consider The Farmer

Since I began eating seasonally I keep a piece of fruit on my desk in a nearly flat celadon green bowl. A bowl the size of my palm with a single painted stem of bamboo. It's the perfect pedestal for a late summer peach, a newly shined apple, one blood orange, three figs or a winter persimmon. The fruit is elevated to art, displayed as if it were still a flower on the branch.

I study the fruit as if I were going to draw it, paint it, as if someone else already committed it to canvas. I notice the places the colors fade, stretch, pull forward, the texture, stem. The places where the juice is held in its miraculous skin.

I consider the farmer that planted the tree. That waited moons and storms for the tree to produce, worried over it, watered and watched it as close I do at my desk. I consider the field worker who picked the fruit, boxed it, put it on the truck for market. And I consider the person I handed my cash to. A simple exchange of smiles, a balancing act of bags in a weathered market with a tent.

It's not until I've lifted the fruit from it's perch, one bite removed, that I reach back for the landscape from which it came. The apples that were barely formed during the California fires. Is there a flavor of the haze that hung over us for days and weeks? And the peaches, they taste like more sunny days then I remember the summer containing. How is that possible? The first fall figs are nearly bland, rushed somehow, hesitant to invest their sugar. What do they know that I don't? I suppose I'll have to watch and see.

It's a small pleasure this one of contemplating the fruit. But it feeds me well.