“Oh the foes will rise with the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
and they’ll know that it’s for real
The hour that the ship comes in”
It was at least a dozen years ago, Barbara was getting some landscaping done in our wild, unruly back yard. She asked me if there were any plants or shrubbery that I might like.
“A fig tree,” I replied.
I had visions of sitting under my proverbial fig tree in peace and prosperity and enjoying the bounty of ripe fruit that it was sure to produce.
The fig tree arrived in the form of little more than a stick and I knew it would be many years before it would be large enough to sit under never mind bear fruit. The same year, a neighbor was digging up a more mature (but not by much) fig tree in her yard and asked on the list serve if anyone wanted it. I responded and soon I had it planted next to the other one. Probably too close.
A few of those early years had very cold winters and I was sure that the trees had died but every spring they came back to life. There is an injunction in Jewish law that prohibits harvesting the fruit of a tree for the first three years of its life. Suffice it to say, I never faced any temptation to violate this commandment.
Then around year five, one of the trees produced exactly one fig. I plucked it when ripe and shared it with my wife and daughter and son-in-law who were visiting for lunch. We said the blessing for eating a fruit or doing a thing for the first time in its season.
Blessed are you, source of life, who has given us life, sustained us, and allowed us to reach this moment.
In each subsequent year, the harvest increased a little but very few of the fruits ended up in our larder or tummies.
It turned out that the figs ripened in mid to late August exactly when we are usually away on vacation. By the time we returned home, the trees which had been laden with green fruit when we left had been stripped bare by squirrels, birds, and deer. For a while, we had a groundhog living in a space under the concrete steps that lead to an exit door from the basement. My friend Tom says he sometimes saw the groundhog in the tree happily munching away.
This summer, the trees filled up with the most fruit, I have ever seen on them. Perhaps it was the enormous quantity of rain we got in June and July and the hot humid days we had this summer. I didn’t expect to eat many, however. In late July, with the trees heavy with unripe figs we headed up north for several weeks of biking, hiking and camping on Cape Cod and in the Adirondacks.
Imagine my surprise, when we returned home last week and found the trees full of ripe, purple figs!. Many of them had been nibbled to be sure but there were plenty that were intact. I went out in the cool of the evening and picked a large bowl of them getting eaten in turn by a swarm of gnats sending me running to find the hydrocortisone cream.
The figs were ripe, many overripe and decisions had to be made quickly. A ripe fig doesn’t last long. I though about trying to dry them in the oven but I had bad luck with that last year burning all ten of the figs I got to an inedible crisp.
I decided to make jam, which is easy to do and hard to mess up. You just boil the fruit with water. I added some lemon juice for brightness and the lemon seeds for the pectin. After fishing out the seeds, I weighed the water and fruit and added the same weight of sugar and cooked it until it got thick with big bubbles and congealed on a plate that had been in the freezer. I got more than 2 pounds of the stuff. I didn’t properly preserve it so it has to be keep in the refrigerator. However, it keeps for a long time because it is basically solid sugar with some fig in it. Still it is very tasty and goes great on a slice of sourdough bread (homemade, of course) with some creamy goat cheese.
I had just finished making the jam when Tom’s wife, Christine, stopped by. She had brought us a gift. It was a whale butter dish like the one I had been tempted by on Nantucket but hadn’t bought. She had found it online at a very reasonable price, she proudly told us. We sent her off with a jar of still-warm jam and half a loaf of sourdough that I had also made that day.
Good things come in the fullness of time though they may not line up exactly with the original vision. I had imagined sitting under my fig trees as ripe fruit dropped into my lap. The reality is sitting on the screened porch (no gnats!) and enjoying fig jam and butter from a blue whale on fresh bread.
And still more figs ripen everyday. As we enjoy these cooler evenings dining on the porch, after dinner I walk out to the fig trees and pick a handful to enjoy as dessert. My patience paid off. The ship has come in. I pinch myself and squeal.
Here is a poem I wrote about figs, jam, and the ephemeral.
Elul
We arrived home to find the tree heavy
with fruit, some rotting,
bees delirious with their good fortune.
Today, we blessed the new month
the year’s farewell.
The sun sleeps in. Already, it is cooler.
Days feel snug like last year’s jacket.
Fig jam bubbles on the stove —
summer surrendering her sweetness.
***
The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing.