I'm eating a pear. It is unusually delicious. Why have I not been eating more pears all of these years? And then I think of the year when there were so many pears in my life that they rotted in buckets. Maybe I had too many pears for a moment. The tree on the construction site was scrappy and on its last legs. Death throws in the form of shoots from its bark covered ankles. Because the tree was slated to be taken down, i went up into its limbs with a cordless sawzall and started cutting off whole branches to harvest from. In the photographs all you can see are my legs disappearing into a mass of leaves and pears flying through the air. Soft fruit on the edge of rot gives me anxiety. All of that potential being wasted! One year the peach tree in my driveway was exceptionally prodigious in the quantities of peaches that it offered. I bemoaned the situation to my mother. Her advice was not to can or freeze the peaches, but rather to make sure that I ate at least seven peaches a day. At first I complied unthinkingly. Likely it was some olde New England wisdom; and who was I to question the quantities of peaches to compulsorily consume? What’s the most of one thing that you ever ate because you felt like you had to? Did anything odd happen? *
