Persimmons

My maternal grandparents had a large backyard that stepped down into a San Diego canyon in shady tiers of fruit trees - tangerine, avocado, persimmon, plum, fig, lemon and loquat.  One of my clearest memories of my grandfather is of him lifting cardboard flats of produce out of the trunk of his sedan when he visited, or carrying them out to load into our VW van when we visited him.  Flats of avocado, apricots, tangerines for juicing, loquats, figs - my grandparents were a CSA before CSAs were a thing.

My grandfather was raised on an Iowa farm, the 3rd of 11 children.  My grandmother was a city girl, born and raised in the blossoming metropolis of San Diego, but San Diego is a place where fruit trees grow like corn and she was born to a mother who let nothing go to waste.  She was raised not amid fields but among fruit trees.

Fruit trees grew on the small property owned by my great-grandparents, and every picture of my grandmother, her parents and her sister and then later, my grandfather, mother and aunt is taken in front of a fruit tree.  In this picture of my grandmother and my mom you can see the ladder leaning up against a loquat tree that grew on my great-grandparent's property. I'm sure there was a flat of loquats on the kitchen counter, waiting to be put in the car.

Here's my gorgeous grandmother and dapper grandfather in front of the same tree.  My grandmother made the clothes you see in these photos.  I know that's what people used to do, but she was particularly good at it, as my great-grandmother was and my mother is.












I've been thrown into this nostalgia because last week I saw my colleague and mentor Ron carrying a weighty brown paper bag full of persimmons down the hall of my school.  I got all excited, like you do when you see a bag (or a cardboard flat!) of beautiful home-grown fruit, and five minutes later he came into my office cradling four of them, like an offering.

When you grow up with flats of tree fruit needing homes, you grow up learning that fruit cannot go to waste. To use up persimmons my grandma made Persimmon Cookies. They were horrible.  They were ginger-colored, fluffy, and had nuts and raisins in them.  I ate them because even as a kid I knew making persimmon cookies was one way my grandmother showed her love for us.  Also, my parents were health-conscious and I was sugar-deprived.

My grandmother was driven, and not the most gentle of women.  She returned to university when my mother and aunt were young teens and she became a high school English teacher.  It's not easy, as I know, to be a working mother or a college student and a mother.  Right now I'm all three - in grad school (again), working full time and raising two beautiful girls.  I'm similar to my grandmother in another way, too. She often had a "hard done by" mentality.  A by-product of her admirable and relentless work ethic was a bitterness, a "why can't any of you help out more?" attitude that I am often guilty of.  It's difficult to slow down and soften up when your to-do list never ends and your internal engine says "go go go."  Here were four gorgeous persimmons, begging to be used.  One more thing on my weekend's to-do list.

Yesterday, I took a good long look at the persimmon cookie recipe, lovingly encased in plastic in my grandmother's recipe box that I now own. I felt myself slipping into a sort of bad baked-good PTSD, so I put the recipe away and pulled out some cookbooks.  My 9-year old came in, highly tuned as she is to any cooking project. She wanted to help.  We all know that any project involving a 9-year old is a project that takes longer and requires more cleaning up, and I wanted to get this done and finish folding laundry.  I said, "No honey, I just want to get this baked."  She went to read in the living room, and I remembered my grandmother.

I remembered standing by the stove while she taught me to cook a skinless chicken breast with Pam - a delicious low cholesterol treat for my grandfather.  I remembered her letting us put a little Mocha Mix into our cereal to give the blue nonfat milk more opacity.  I remembered her patiently letting us squeeze mountains of tangerines into juice.  She may not have slowed down for her daughters, but she slowed down for us.  I called my daughter back into the kitchen and let her and Ruth Reichl get to work on some spice cake.

Reichl's recipe called for pumpkin and apple, but my daughter decided pureed persimmon would do just fine.  Here she's modeling the "C" grip for safe cutting she learned at school.

Pumpkin-Apple Cake suddenly became persimmon cake, and the magic of cooking turned an item on the to-do list into a memory, my daughter and I whisking eggs and scraping a perfect cup of sugar, peeking in on cakes to see if they were done.

The house smelled good.  I shoved the laundry into a corner.  It could wait.

The persimmon cake was perfect, moist, dense and spicy. We had seconds, then thirds. My mom stopped by for a visit and a slice. I sent her home with a Tupperware flat of cake.






In this way a woman's life echoes down.  She may be cranky, she may waste her time on laundry instead of the children she loves. She makes mistakes, but every once in a while the right decision is made.  Sometimes it takes a fruit one can't bear to waste to pause the endless grind, warm up the oven and put what's really important at the top of the list.

Meeting my Daughter

Yesterday started with my daughter telling me to "stop being a Butt."  Like Butts do, I had nagged her to hurry up and get ready to go, which sent her into a hair flinging, backpack swinging, name-calling rage.  "You cannot talk to me that way," I said, feeling powerless and lame and old, something that did not result in her wrapping her arms around me and telling me how much she loves me.

Angry, hurt, wondering where I'd failed as a mother, I'm embarrassed to say I gave her the silent treatment on the way to school and stormed into my office without even telling her I loved her. I'm sure that showed her.

This stage of parenting is something you have to experience to believe.  We've all been snotty adolescents, but loving one with all your heart is like cave diving - unknown, deadly, and terrifying.

I've taught adolescents for more than twenty years.  I know them.  I get them, but my daughter has become a stranger.  Not too long ago I was highly tuned to my daughter's needs.  Tantrum?  "She's hungry," "She's exhausted," or "She's anxious."  Now, tantrums seem to be caused by my presence in the room, the sound of my voice or my loving touch, and it is not predictable.  At 5:15 I'm Mommy, the center of her world.  At 5:19 the sound of my voice makes her want to throw up.

Luckily, I teach in a middle school.  When I left my daughter yesterday morning I moved among hundreds of children her age whose faces light up in delight when they see me, as hers does when she sees her beloved teachers.

At lunch my students gave me a great gift.  I stood on our field in the pouring rain and ripping wind, and children came out like they do to run, and cartwheel and race, and gambol around outside free from paper and grades and the plastic torture-devices that are our blue plastic school chairs.  These two simply wandered, arms linked, raising their faces to the rain and holding onto each other in the buffeting wind.

I wondered if they ever called their mothers "Butt," and then realized it didn't really matter.  Even a child who calls her mother names becomes this child when she's twelve years old and with a good friend.  My daughter was, even as I took this picture, being this child with her friends somewhere in our school.  She was this child to her teachers, adults just like me except that she adores them all the time.  She would be this child with me again.  Children have goodness in them all the time.  For adolescents particularly, it's the setting that determines whether or not it's safe for that goodness to be shared.

After school I took my daughter to a coffee shop she loves near our house.  Though not too long ago I knew her so well I could read her needs and fix them with Cheerios or a cuddle, I felt a little awkward and shy, as if meeting her for the first time.  She talked about things that matter to her and told funny stories about things that happened during her day.  I packed away my "I know you so well" certainty, outdated as knowing how to make a cassette for a friend, and worked hard to listen and learn.  She was funny, and goofy, and raw in that way people with confidence but no polish or self-consciousness are.  I realized I liked this person even more than I liked the baby, toddler, and little girl she once was. This person was new to me.  This person had something to offer I couldn't anticipate and didn't already know.

I'd like to say we talked and then held hands and danced across a meadow afterwards, best friends forever, but the truth is we drank our drinks and left a little respectfully and guardedly, like new neighbors who'd just met in a driveway.

I'm glad she's moved in.