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."

Strange Harvest

The lone pear tree on the property, planted by idealistic former tenants, every year raises not only my hopes but excites the opossums, squirrels, maggots, birds and bugs around here. Enraptured by the spring blossoms, we watch amazed as they form green pears that gain weight all summer. Then the animals get them all. Except this year they left them for me. It's a plentiful harvest, but they're all bizarre and deformed like these:

The problem could be 1) Leafroller worms chewing on the buds back in spring, creating oddly-shaped pears and bronze-colored scabbing. 2) Another kind of worm, and we had a plague of army worms in May. 3) Fruit fungus (thus the brownish-black patch on the middle pear). 4) Fukushima. A photo of a pear grown this year near Fukushima, Japan, found online, looks a lot like these.