I was posting in another
thread tonight when I was reminded of my very first
experience with wild persimmons. I thought I had written about it here, but it turns out it was on a
Facebook post in 2013. Facebook is the roach motel of the internet -- stuff checks in, but it doesn't check out, and you can't even link to it reliably. So here, lightly edited, is the story about the time that my father-in-law taught me to pick persimmons from beyond the grave.
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This morning my love went out with some of her family to do a bit of cleanup work on the family cemetery at the back of the property. She brought me back a ripe wild persimmon that was rich and sweet, no bigger than a large Concord grape and full of fat seeds, but delicious and utterly without any trace of that vile alum astringency that persimmons can have when not perfectly ripe.
She told me it was from the persimmon tree by the grave of her father, Tommy, who used to like to eat them and specified that he wanted to be buried under that tree after he passed away in 1987. I asked her if there were a lot more and she laughed and said "oh, yeah" so I inquired if anyone would mind if I went to pick some. She assured me that it was fine, and indeed "Dad always liked to eat them and would be happy to have somebody enjoying them."
So I grabbed a sack and went wandering back to check out this persimmon tree. Turns out there are actually *six* persimmon
trees in a cluster, and they are heavy with fruit. But most of it is (a) not yet ripe and (b) twenty or more feet off the ground. I see a few fruits I can reach but they are clearly unripe, being hard and firmly fixed to their stems.
Mind you, this is the first time I've ever met a wild persimmon; my only previous persimmon experience is with larger Asian varieties conveniently delivered to farmers markets for me when I lived in California. So I'm standing there looking like an idiot, my head thrown back and my face staring (probably slack-jawed) at all that unreachable fruit far above my head, utterly at a loss as to how I could harvest any of this bounty. And as I'm standing there like a fool, there's a brief stir of wind, the branches of the trees rustle gently, and there's a loud *PLOP* as a fat ripe persimmon plummets past my face and drops into the grass and weeds about six inches from the brass plaque that the VA provided to mark Tommy's grave.
I picked up the persimmon and stared at it for a moment, noticed that it had separated easily from the stem, unlike the unripe fruits I had been tugging at. In an instant, all had become clear. Taking what was perhaps a too-familiar liberty with a man I never met, I said "Thanks, Tommy!" because now I understood how to harvest the ripe fruit while leaving the rest alone. A combination of gentle tugs at the tips of fruit-laden branches (when low
enough) and firm shaking of the tree trunks generated a steady rain of ripe fruit into the grasses and weeds around me. To be sure, it felt like more of them were landing on my *head* than random chance alone ought to have occasioned; but if perhaps Tommy's Seminole Indian shade was having a little gentle fun with the ignorant white boy who's not from around here, well, from the stories I've been told about the man, that would not be entirely out of character.
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As much as anything, the discovery of those wild persimmon trees over Tommy's grave was what jump-started my interest in the
local wild fruit and nut trees, and from there, my interest in food forests, which
led me to discover Permies.com and
permaculture. Thanks, Tommy!
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