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Pomegranates
Oct. 21st, 2008 11:37 pmThe other night I was in the grocery store with my father (the cashier totally thought we were a couple, ewwwww!) who had driven over to hang out because my siblings had left him all alone or something, and we were browsing the produce section (on our way to get carrots for dinner) when I saw them: pomegranates. Now usually grocery store pomegranates are a depressing thing, sad, small, and miscolored, but these were large, round, and ruby. I wanted one. And so, I got one (because I am a grown up and can buy expensive fruit even if I am there with my daddy). And it tasted like autumn and hope and dreamy innocence begging to be broken. There is no stranger or more evocative food in my mind.
As a child, there are specifically two places I remember pomegranates from. The first, was the Thanksgiving type dinner for my pre-school, where they were center places that you then got to take home and eat. They were singular and rare and there was never enough.
The second is a bit more pastoral, more mythic. We lived in student family housing while I was growing up, and across the road from our complex were gardens (which could actually be rented per year for about what I pay a month for my cat these days I think) and they were a wonderful place for the kids in the area, riding bikes down paths and placing hide and seek among trees and tall grass. There was also a pomegranate tree. It might have been someone's or the lot might have been unrented at the time. But the tree was there, and I remember grasping the precious fruit (more so because it was rare, so seasonal) and eating it on shortening fall afternoons with the other kids, hands sticky and red. If I ever have the yard for it, I'd like to have a pomegranate tree. I hope the neighbor kids or my nieces and nephews will find something in it's branches to dwell on.
Pomegranates are seasonal, a fruit for the fall, for the darkening days of the descent into winter. Every seed is like a jewel as you peel back layers of covering to reveal them. Being a hopeless idealist in some ways, I cannot help but see them layered in myth, the delicate indulgence that damned Persephone forever. And that is part of their charm. Bloody and vibrant, they seem a harbinger of awakening sexuality. Perhaps it all ties in with the encroaching winter. The pomegranate comes before darker days, but it is in some primal way. Some sort of promise of death and rebirth. Of course it is the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, the tempting unknown that would start mankind down a path of joys and heartbreak.
Given all this, how could I not smile sadly, like the heroine of some great epic, when staring down at my sticky hands, the sweet and sour juices staining them. I'm ready for what comes next, I've been through the darkness before and I'll be there on the other side.
As a child, there are specifically two places I remember pomegranates from. The first, was the Thanksgiving type dinner for my pre-school, where they were center places that you then got to take home and eat. They were singular and rare and there was never enough.
The second is a bit more pastoral, more mythic. We lived in student family housing while I was growing up, and across the road from our complex were gardens (which could actually be rented per year for about what I pay a month for my cat these days I think) and they were a wonderful place for the kids in the area, riding bikes down paths and placing hide and seek among trees and tall grass. There was also a pomegranate tree. It might have been someone's or the lot might have been unrented at the time. But the tree was there, and I remember grasping the precious fruit (more so because it was rare, so seasonal) and eating it on shortening fall afternoons with the other kids, hands sticky and red. If I ever have the yard for it, I'd like to have a pomegranate tree. I hope the neighbor kids or my nieces and nephews will find something in it's branches to dwell on.
Pomegranates are seasonal, a fruit for the fall, for the darkening days of the descent into winter. Every seed is like a jewel as you peel back layers of covering to reveal them. Being a hopeless idealist in some ways, I cannot help but see them layered in myth, the delicate indulgence that damned Persephone forever. And that is part of their charm. Bloody and vibrant, they seem a harbinger of awakening sexuality. Perhaps it all ties in with the encroaching winter. The pomegranate comes before darker days, but it is in some primal way. Some sort of promise of death and rebirth. Of course it is the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, the tempting unknown that would start mankind down a path of joys and heartbreak.
Given all this, how could I not smile sadly, like the heroine of some great epic, when staring down at my sticky hands, the sweet and sour juices staining them. I'm ready for what comes next, I've been through the darkness before and I'll be there on the other side.
