The Little Bodies of the Pears

Uncared-for, unpruned pear tree in the yard that by all odds should not be thriving is doing fine, thanks, and for a few days in June I get to see its pears, growing butt-side upward, or twinned, shapely but always bite-sized, and just as they blush yellow and need one more day to look edible I wake up to find every one of them gone. As if I had dreamed them! Not a core left beneath the tree -- not a clue as to which species ate all the pears, or when. So this year after admiring them I took some pictures and then picked a few, that I might prove I did not dream them, because by all rights, on top of a cliff with one inch of soil and six inches of clay on top of sandstone, a pear tree should not be growing here. But it doesn't care if it should or not.

Neither should prickly pears, as in prickly-pear cactus, be growing a mere 15 feet away in a tiny, stony south-facing, two-foot-square micro-climate next to the pumphouse, but so it is, and when it's time it has those spiny crimson pears with little puckers growing whisker-like thorns. Given the right micro-climate, like hot sandstone, cactus in the Ozarks isn't unusual.

Yet two kinds of pears -- almost within arms' length of each other? That proves they're divine. Surely I live on the border of the imaginary and the real. On top of that, I can never forget what a man said to me one day, "Pears are sexy."