“Fruit”

Indulgence in what we love most is as fleeting as a summer peach.

Every fall, my mother looks forward to pomegranates. She whacks them with a mallet until their seeds are loosened, slices them into quarters, and then gently peels out their seeds with her fingers. She eats them in a small bowl using a spoon.

In my childhood home, our one luxury is fruit. Grapes spill out of the refrigerator into bowls next to blackberries and figs. We have a peach tree in our garden, bursting with small, thick-skinned peaches that my father collects and carries into the house in baskets and baskets. One summer night, a group of unknowns crept into our garden and stole our peaches—the mystery of whodunit remains unsolved.

Each year, my father keeps track of the last raspberry of every season, a rare berry that ripens sometimes as late as Thanksgiving. He nurtures our raspberries, along with the rest of our garden; gardening keeps him from getting tangled in life’s colossal blows.

As a teenager, I went through a period where I ate mostly just fruit. Later, I learned that if life is indeed a mess of gestures, food is ecstatically constant and irreplaceable. We must eat, and the unbreakable rule of hunger is to eat when you’re hungry, drink when you’re thirsty, and above all else, cherish any and every piece of fruit your body needs. We are, after all, in perpetual motion.

–Camille Dourmashkin-Cagol