Mouth to Mouth

What would Jesus do?

In the world of abundance, the top branches are reserved for the birds, for they like figs, too, and we are better animals when we have them around. The lower branches serve best for snacking, and the in between, well, these are for a ladder and a bowl and perhaps somebody who is willing to pay fifty bucks for five pounds, like the woman who rang today, who will turn these rain dappled figs into something amazing, something even more expensive.

An architect once said to me that people don’t like to look at fig trees, that they’re ugly. I find them a wonder, both with and without leaves, and when they start to bud, when those green shoots pop from the brown, it is akin to a chrysalis splitting open with the wings of a just birthed butterfly. 

This same man spoke of flies that come when the mulberry drops her fruit. This is true. The flies do come. But what if there were incentive to pick every berry? What if more people were to eat what was in season? What if more chefs were to create with what is easy and readily available? And an idea hatched in the moment: what if paw paw (a fruit pollinated by flies) were to be interplanted with mulberry?

Is there a fascination for the difficult? 

I know that I am willing to face difficulty in the beginning for a reward in the end. I have sat in Habana Vieja with a breakfast of sliced guava and a water bottle, and when the waitress tried to take this bottle, in my best Spanish I said, “Yo necissito semillas por mi jardin in Nuevo Orleans.” She seemed to be pleased that I wanted to keep the seeds. And I could have said yo quiero, but chose I need over I want. An interesting request not even considered until the time of this writing.

Those seeds I babied in their infancy until they became strong enough to stand on their own. If I had tens of thousands of seeds I would simply plant them all in ground and let the strong survive, but I had only a couple hundred.

What warms my heart is that there is a school in the East, meaning New Orleans East where a guava bush exploded with fruit a few years ago and where a man from Uganda, I believe, from somewhere in Africa, ate the very fruit before they even became ripe. “Like an apple,” I was told.

And to know that seeds that sat in my mouth in Cuba later grew into seeds that would fill the belly of a man I never met, well, that’s enough to keep me going.

And I meant to write about wasps and figs, but like they tell the kids, “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.”