A season of gluttony and blame

Everything is fruiting, and ripening, and rotting right now.

We are in the gluttonous time of year, which I suppose most people around the world call harvest. The time to reap everything we have sown and hope it will yield enough to pay our bills or keep our children alive.

But I am neither a farmer nor even an urban homesteader. I am a fruit mooch, a skimmer of others’ extras, a hobbyist cook. For me, during this gluttonous time, a useless set of emotions takes hold on our daily walks around the neighborhood. Greed is one. The other is judgy-ness.

I mean, who plants an apple tree in their parking strip and then pretends it doesn’t exist?

There are at least a dozen in my neighborhood that have wept undersized fruit all over the pavement. Every single fruit is punctured by a dainty, black-rimmed hole, rotting from the core outward, incubating yet another generation of coddling moths. These apples are useless for anything but cider, provided you aren’t skeeved out by larvae and mold.

One of our neighbors, whose yard gets me really riled up, owns two giant apple trees that arch over the sidewalk, a tunnel of branches dense enough to make the temperature inside drop from summer to fall. The sidewalk in this tunnel is an obstacle course, where we dance around rotting apples, trying not to slip on the squished plum pulp from yet another overgrown tree in their yard.

For a gleaner, the sense of possibility feels urgent. So much is ripe right now, and there is so much of it. Apples. Pears of all sorts. Italian plums. Blackberries. Salal berries. Grapes. Someone should rescue all this beautiful fruit, I tell myself as we pass yet another shedding tree or vine, even if it’s too ripe or too damaged for the Portland Fruit Tree Project. On our walks I keep adding new tasks to my to-do list, most of which I’ll never tick off. Life might feel purposeless, I suppose, if it’s not weighed down with self-inflicted guilt.

There are already five pounds of Bartlett pears in my refrigerator from a neglected street tree. We pass buckets or bowls with “Free food” signs, and out of respect I always grab something, an Asian pear or Santa Rosa plum or two. I even texted a neighbor who has two Cornelian cherry trees full of fruit, asking her if I could take some off her hands, and I don’t like Cornelian cherries. A stranger emailed me this week asking if I’d like some of her extra elderberries, and her offer was so delightful and unexpected that now I’m plotting out the things I will make with them.

Of course I have been spending my free time taking advantage of the gluttonous season. When friends left on a long road trip just as their yellow plums were at their most luscious and sweet, I bought home as much as we could pick. Now I am fermenting two gallons of plum vinegar in the basement.

A neighbor who donated apples to my ill-fated cider pressing last year texted me to ask if I was interested in this year’s crop. We reconvened last year’s cider pressing crew two Sundays ago, each of us bringing apples we’d gathered from street trees or our own orchards. We spent an afternoon sitting around a rented cider press, trimming off the bits that squirmed or made us squirm, squeezing seven or eight buckets of fruit into 5 gallons of juice. That’s now fermenting away in the basement, too. So far, I’m pleased to report, it doesn’t smell like rhino farts, though the situation could change at any second.

I also pestered the contractor who fixed up our kitchen to let me glean from his Italian plum tree, and after weeks of checking back I finally picked 30 pounds of plums to ferment. The back basement is now filled with giant buckets topped with airlocks. My husband is not pleased. Neither is the plum tree owner. I left another 40 pounds of almost-ripe fruit on the tree.

And yet all the waste I see around the neighborhood keeps intruding. I fear that all my sniping over street trees that could be gleaned for neighbors who can’t afford to buy a lot of fresh fruit at the store – well, it isn’t really driven by an altruistic sense of injustice. It’s another mask for my own greed, fueled by the constant worry that there isn’t enough time to consume everything I want, rather than investigating the roots of that wanting. The clouds of blame and regret that puff up as I walk, they’re stirred up by … what, exactly?

Does the tree, its drive to reproduce phrased as reciprocal generosity, really mind if no one carts away all its fruit? Most of us humans would just toss the tree’s seeds into the compost, and the city will roast them into a crisp. Does the soil beneath the tree mind if microbes and insects devour the fruit, nourishing all the underground life with decaying organic matter? We humans are quick to paste our own ideas of violation or injustice onto this abundance. To all the other beings, nothing has been wasted.

There is a reason I titled this newsletter “A Place Is a Gift.” Right now, everything around me is yelling: Here, take this gift! Please take more! When I stop grousing and coveting and fermenting in order to write, which is how I card the burrs out of my thoughts to spin myself into something finer, the writing reminds me to treat the gift with respect. And to extend that respect to the gifts not accepted. The gluttonous time will be over in just a few weeks. It only becomes too much if I try to measure it.