The Fruit Crop

Since coming back, I’ve learned that this year’s fruit crop in Roscoe has been the best in years.  I’m told that the peach trees across the street were so loaded that they were breaking the limbs, and the same was true for apricots and cherries.  Because of my late arrival, I missed out on these, but my cousin Arlo welcomed me home by taking me out to his apple trees and having me pick a plastic grocery bag full.  He’s got so many apples this year he doesn’t know what to do with them all, and there are dozens under the trees just lying on the ground.  

Arlo's apples

My mother’s pomegranate bush is covered with pomegranates, not ripe yet.

 Pomegranates

And the jujube tree in the back yard is similarly loaded.  When I say jujubes, I’m not talking about those little candies you get at the movie theater, but real jujubes, the kind that grow on trees.   They’re oval shaped, about an inch-and-a-half tall, and, when ripe, have a brown skin.  When I was little, my mother used them to make jujube butter, similar in color and flavor to apple butter.  But the best thing to do is to just eat them straight off the tree.  They taste more like an apple than anything else, but really they have their own flavor.  They always remind me of Roscoe since that’s about the only place I’ve ever seen them—except for Iran, where they originally came from. There you can buy them in the markets. 

Jujubes