Only the living bruise. And who hasn't taken a knock or two from life? My observation is that the riper one gets, the bruisier too, if due care is not taken. As with people, so with fruit.
It's not so fashionable nowadays, but fifty or so years ago many families used to grow their own fruit, with apple, pear or plum trees in their back gardens, and oftentimes currant and gooseberry bushes as well. Maybe we need to make a return to some degree of self-sufficiency in fruit and vegetable growing? That's my thought for the day.
A shorter blog this time on account of the Seasiders' bruising away trip to Sheffield! This latest poem was inspired by the memory of our unconventional near neighbours when I was a child growing up in Peterborough in the early 1960s. Some of the larger Victorian properties in the road had two sets of stairs; (not ours). There was the main staircase from the hall up to the bedrooms, but also a back stairs down again to the kitchen and scullery, a legacy from when even lower middle-class households would have employed a maid.
The afore-mentioned neighbours, who had quite an orchard in their back garden, used their back stairs as a place to store their fruit, it being cool and dry (and uncarpeted). Every step was filled with either apples or pears. We'd help with the fruit-picking and they'd start storing them from the top down, and would gradually consume them from the bottom up over the winter and spring months. The aroma on that staircase was complex and delicious.
I didn't know, aged nine, that apples and pears was cockney rhyming slang, but I wonder now if it was a common practice and if there is the remotest possibility of a practical truth behind that particular choice of rhyme.
Backstairs
Gently New Age decades before its dawn,
in that summer as we small boys fretted
about world war three and nuclear winter
they sat calmly in the kitchen's dull glow,
he with Jesus beard and pipe and sandals,
she barefoot, braless and Bible-backed,
assuring us that God would speak his will
to Khrushchev to Kennedy, Christians both
and all would be well. I thought of Hitler...
We'd picked a fruitful day in their orchard
and afterwards that layering of the harvest
from top step down with care not to bruise
a piece, disturb the dust of departed maids
or harm the webs that laced limecast loam.
Twilit with happy smiles, that odd couple
promised peace by Christmas, plentiful pies
and the love of the Lord as they dispatched
us weary youngsters to our ordinary homes.
That night, I dreamed about the backstairs
to heaven, heady with the cider of love and
shining with radioactive apples and pears.
Thanks for reading, S ;-)