persimmon love

One of the best parts of Fall around here is persimmon season. I’m not talking about those huge Japanese persimmons, but rather the tiny, wild, potent version native to North Carolina.

By the time the persimmons are ready, the persimmon trees have lost all their leaves—the persimmons themselves cling to empty branches, like Christmas ornaments.

Sophie says you can tell when a persimmon is ripe because its skin looks like your fingers after you’ve been in the tub too long, that is, wrinkly and loose. Indeed, a ripe persimmon is a little bit gross, all squishy and soft. In any ordinary fruit, this would be the over-ripe, throw it out stage.

But not so the wild persimmons! Persimmons are far from ordinary. If you don’t wait until they simply burst in your hand…

….they’ll cause your tongue to peel off with a crazy-wild-tart flavor something like gargling turpentine. But if they go squish when you pick them up, they are perfect. Floral, sweet, amazing. I’ve run baskets of them through a sieve to gather the glowing orange goop that is, by itself, ambrosia. But you can also use the goop for persimmon pudding or persimmon bread or persimmon muffins…. There’s nothing like it.

I had a dog, a huge, white, samoyed named Kodiak, who loved persimmons so much, he would snorfle them up like a vacuum until the ground was clean—I mean, he would eat a hundred of them at a time if he could. I’d have to run to get to one or two before he ate them all, we would be racing around the tree, fighting over persimmons, it was hilarious. When the ground had been scoured, I would give up and move on, but he would lie down under the tree and wait for the next fruit to fall, getting to his feet (a laborious process in his latter years) in order to eat each and every one. That’s love! When he got cancer, we decided we were going to have to put him down—he was very old and arthritic and deaf by then. Terribly sad. But we put it off until just after persimmon season. I sat with him under the persimmon tree for a week, waiting for persimmons to fall. He would thump his tail and I’d get up, find it, and bring it to him, and he would eat the whole thing, seeds and all, in one loud, slurp. I always think of Kodi when I eat persimmons.

I like persimmon pudding, I do. But I like them best straight off the tree, just like Kodi. It’s messy though. First you squish the persimmon, then you slurp up a glob of the gooey stuff, ooing and ahhing. Then you spit out the seeds. The gloop gets everywhere. But I find I just don’t care.

My grandmother had a Japanese persimmon tree that gave a more elegant fruit to eat. Her persimmons were as big as your fist and you could lift the top flower/stem bit off and eat the flesh out with a spoon, right out of the skin, like custard from a bowl. Amazing, though much milder in flavor than these small, wild, cousins. The limbs would get so heavy with thousands of persimmons, they would bend down and rest on the ground. That tree was lost in a hurricane, along with the ancient old pecan tree that grown to drape itself across the whole backyard. The whole family mourned those trees.

Persimmons and loss, who knew there was such a connection?

Did I mention that weird persimmon-teeth feeling afterwards, like you’ve grown fur on the insides of your mouth? What is that, mega-astringency or something? Like your teeth are peeling. Freaky. But totally worth it. I love me some persimmons. And that color!! These pictures totally fail to capture it.

Completely unrelated to persimmons, except that it is in the same yard, my aunt’s gingko tree turned gold today.

All the leaves turn on the same day, and fall off together a day later. Gingkos don’t go for a coy, bit by bit, strip-tease. They drop their drawers all at once, making a gorgeous gold carpet on the ground. Luc collected dozens of leaves today and filled his pockets. “They look like fairy wings, don’t you think?”

The sun came out today after what feels like weeks of rain. I think it was only a week, but even so, the blue sky is like a revelation! Oh yeah, it gets blue up there sometimes!

Happy Fall….