This sudden heatwave (as in, it feels like it came from nowhere, not that it has not been forecast and told about in excitement, way before it was here) has me looking through the window, the body peeking out into the street to see who’s around at this late hour of the afternoon. Some call it evening, but for me evening starts when it’s fully dark. So, afternoon.
And this early spring warmth also has a strange effect on me. Suddenly, I’m not here and now; I’m somewhere else, many years ago. I can’t help it!
Then, or now, as it feels like it was just happening, the strawberry season is at its peak; we’ve likely eaten kilos of strawberries with ice cream by now. Not the whipped cream or (gasp!) the plain cream Britons have with their strawberries come Wimbledon. No, no. Just ice cream. Nata montada. Unflavoured cream, sugared, iced. With your strawberries. And sometimes with a bit of sugar sprinkled on top.
But we’ll soon be leaving those behind and start on the first of the stone fruits: the cherries.
It begins with the promise: that these big first specimens, which also are a little bit pale and a little bit sour and tasteless because they’ve been grown on greenhouses for the overeager people, will be but the lowest point, and in due time we’ll start savouring the small little cherries, still tangy, but sweeter.
And then… the big players will come into the scene and we’ll get the picotas, deep in both colour and flavour, and more importantly… juicy and fleshy and plump. The type I would snack on while at my grandmother’s deli shop. Pretending, I thought, no one would see what I was doing. I’d grab one on the way in, and one (or two) on the way out, as they were in a box by the entrance, ready to tempt patrons. Of course you end up with the lips and hands full of that purple hue, but… “hey, it’s fruits she’s snacking on. It’s fine; there are much worse things one could be secretly eating”.
Not too late afterwards, the loquats will start showing in boxes next to the cherries, their mysterious scent sharing a place of pride in these memories. They are often collected with their thick and sturdy branches, sometimes their big dark green leaves too, a bit wilted and diminished.
These fruits don’t come from afar in my memories, as plenty of growers have a few of these trees on the edges of their fields. So they’re fresh, underripe at the beginning (tirantes, we’d say) and resisting your bite, their green character and tannins telling you off for your impatience. I want to think I preferred to wait until they were soft, and perfectly ripe, but I’m sure I just tried them anyway. The season is so short! You have to have them while you can, fighting with the tedium of their skin and the ever present question: to eat or not to eat it? Never sure what to do. And do you keep the stones? Will this be the year you try to plant them and grow a tree?
And then, the apricots.
It must mean summer is practically here now! Even though it’s still a month and a half away, and yet, we will kid ourselves, excited by the first sights of hairy fruits. Some people can’t even keep their enthusiasm under control, and steal them from the trees, when they are still literally green (the word for underripe in Spanish is also “green”, verde), and almost completely bald too.
Biting into those you will hear a screeching sound, and a crunch, and your jaw will go ballistic as it tries to turn that chunk of vegetable fibre into something your body can digest, but it’s welcomed with the strongest tannins the apricots can conjure. I did not enjoy the experience, but others did, repeatedly, every year. Some did get caught, and reprimanded, and, of course, kept doing it—the sight of the fruits on the abandoned field on the way to school was way too tempting to resist.
And at last, we will be in summer.
I will know when, because plums will appear.
First smaller, then a little bit bigger. There’s a certain uncertainty, and I’m not too sure about the order, and it might also depend on the year, but at some point, out of a sudden the number of available varieties will explode, and there will be a rainbow of plums in the shop.
Purple, red, yellow, green. Smaller, bigger. Which one is sweeter? Which one is tangier? It doesn’t matter who you ask, they always will say theirs are sweeter, tangier. They’ll say whatever you want to hear, as they can’t tell: you can’t tell until you eat them, and they might be tired of eating them by now. You’ll want to have them anyway, so why bother making an attempt to find the truth?
And then… the divas of the stone fruits: the peaches! They will come in their shallow boxes (not too deep, or they would get mushy!). Imagine them delivered on top of flat cushions!
First the round ones, somehow orange fleshed with a dab of red in their skin. Later, the completely red ones, their hairy skin like velvet hair, a touch of green on the side that didn’t face the sun, some red inside the fruit, close to the stone. You get high just cutting into these and inhaling their sweet perfume; the later ones so sweet and floral they remind me of honey, but better. Because there can’t be anything better than this, we tell ourselves, as we prepare a peach for dessert, slicing it into big juicy chunks, putting them on a plate, the liquid sliding down our hands, creating a little puddle on the plate, and take our fruit to the balcony, where we sit to eat it, as the town cools down, and the life signs outside are just stray cats trying to get into the rubbish bins, moths flying around the streetlamp, and bats flying in circles and down to the street lamp and the moths and up to their nests.
Such was the cycle of life and stone fruits!