Sunday, December 09, 2007

Persimmons

Tell me.  How come folks pay more for a quart of atrophied white-shouldered, moldy-assed, ungainly Californicating strawberries than a voluptuous hachiya persimmon?  Honestly! Strawberries in December give you that same queasy feeling as peaking at your presents under the tree (to employ an in-season metaphor).  They're like porn when the girl next door is home alone doing the Sunday crossword in her lingerie.

Because a ripe persimmon is a skinful of quivering pumpkin-apricot jelly.  It's translucent like amber, and'll give you googly eyes, and persists in dangling from denuded branches long into the winter, long after the leaves have fallen, and the snow, too.  The persimmon was meant to make the autumn not just bearable, but exquisite: a study in the beauty of orange on grey, of sweetness in the rain, and something that could be called patience but is far too delicious to be so didactic. For some reason, we can't wait till May for our strawberries, and insist on eating the botox-flavored, injection-molded pretend strawberries they assemble in sunnier regions and ship north on tractor-trailers in December.

Of course I love strawberries!  In May I frolic, I cavort, I gambol for my ruby-hearted strawberries.  I dance all night and fall in love and make shortcake.  Come December, though, I get wise and wrinkly and nibble (gobble, suck, slurp?) those sunny plump persimmons.  And puzzle over 9 across.

Really.  Tell me how they choke those strawberries down.

4 comments:

Petroc said...

I had my first persimmon the other day, a charon. I bought a couple at the supermarket, then was like, "What the fuck is this thing?". I was surprised to learn, after some googling, that you can just eat it as is, bite into the skin, and everything. It felt kind of like those candies that you see people bite into in that scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Zac said...

YOU.MUST.BUY.THIS.CD.

ROGUE'S GALLERY: PIRATE BALLADS, SEA SONGS, AND CHANTEYS.

it is the best purchase you will ever make. i was going to make you a mix with some of the songs on it -but you really need them all. though i suppose i could pirate them for you....

dressedinburgundy said...

Don't listen to him! I downloaded it once and was super excited at the name, but turns out that's the only exciting bit.

Zac said...

LIES!

What were you expecting, Laurel?

If you know anything about music and good writing you will trust me on this.