Eaten

_____________

an eaten pear
is oft forgotten
core is tossed
and left for rotten
but my pear
I swear to thee
thou art forever
art to me

- Aggie Aglaia
_____________

Starfruit

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity.
We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand
- and melting like a snowflake…
~ Francis Bacon, Sr.

I caught sight of a fairly large puffball mushroom with a most unusual birthmark as it was busy divining for water under a tree in the garden. Fortunately I was able to snap its picture before it ran off into the undergrowth.

It Figures

Fig Newton: The force required to accelerate a fig 39.37 inches/sec.
~ J. Hart

One of my favorite fresh fruits is the lowly fig.
I don’t know why, but
for some reason or another, this has not been a good year for figs…
or perhaps I should say this has not been a good year
for buying fresh figs at market around here.
I am persistent, though, and I just picked up another pint of them today. Mmmmmm…yum! They are the essence of late summer perfected.
I love their soft sweet texture and their crunchy little seeds.

La figue est le fruit du figuier commun (Ficus carica) un arbre de la famille des moracées. Les fleurs et fruits du figuier sont d’un type très particulier. La figue est un faux-fruit. Avant d’être un fruit, la figue est une inflorescence en forme d’urne appelée sycone, sorte de petit sac charnu qui enferme une inflorescence constituée de centaines de minuscules fleurs unisexués qui en tapissent l’intérieur. Ces fleurs totalement emprisonnées ne peuvent être fécondées sans intervention extérieure.
~ Wikipédia

Regina Spektor ~ Samson

Beauty and Sustenance

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy,
it will in the end not produce food either.
~ Joseph Wood Krutch

Raphael ~ Et Dans 150 Ans

Heaven, Earth and the Peach Fuzz Inbetween

There are dark shadows on the earth,
but its lights are stronger in the contrast.
~ Charles Dickens

Looming high overhead whilst obliterating the natural beauty of the sky and casting long dark shadows on the earth are the smokestacks referred to by everyone here as Winkin’ Blinkin’ and Nod. Sometimes the coal fumes sink to the earth and nearly suffocate the neighborhood. As much as I hate Winkin’ Blinkin’ and Nod I must admit they are familiar landmarks, and they offer the illusion of security with their seemingly eternal towering omnipresence.

Hugging the ground in the garden below is this gorgeous low shrubby plant with green and white foliage which thrives as if it were living in Vernal Utopia.

Peaches bask in the afternoon sun as they dangle high in their tree, oblivious of everything but their own fuzzy skins and the juices within which are ripening to sweet aromatic perfection.

k.d. lang ~ After the Gold Rush

Tasting Mamey

The septic wound was re-opened, covered by a half’d mamey fruit… and affixed with gauss. Within a week, the wound was clean and free of ill humors.

~ H. L. Henry Wilder
(Memoirs of the Spanish American War, 1907)

At market I found this fascinating Mamey fruit with a history to boot. There is much to learn about it at Wikipedia which is where I found the quote by
H. L. Henry Wilder, and further information is available in the blogpost
Everything you wanted to know about mamey zapotes but were afraid to ask. You can view numerous photos of the tree with flowers and fruits at
Top Tropicals.

I took photos before and after cutting the mamey in half. The fruit smells like raw pumpkin and is quite pleasant tasting — sweet and mild like raw pumpkin with a distinct aromatic maraschino cherry fruitiness infused throughout. The texture falls somewhere between that of a very ripe raw pumpkin and an avocado…it isn’t soft and pasty but it’s not hard or crisp either…it’s difficult to describe. I am pondering whether or not I want to grow the seed.

Don’t forget to eat your fruit!

The Pain of the Pear

Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
~ T.S. Eliot

The pain of the pear seems apparent, you see,
but the point’s not a pierced prehensility.
The problem profuse in this prickly papoose
is a paradigm of psychalgia produced by nonuse.

~ Tabbie