The Non-Doing Pear

My mother made the best pear preserves I've ever tasted. They were so rich and syrupy smooth you'd swear they had butter in them. As my University of Florida botany professor used to say (He was a mushroom specialist, and was talking about the culinary delights of some Florida fungi), "you'd think you'd died and gone to heaven" after eating them.

They were wonderful on a hot biscuit, but sometimes we just ate them out of the jar. And while they were deliciously sweet, they had just enough balance, without being tart, so you didn't feel like you needed to run for the toothbrush after indulging.

The fruits were hard and gritty, and she cooked them just soft enough, but never mushy. Part of the appeal of my mother's preserves was their wonderful brown color. The preserves were a maple-syrup, honey-brown, not the anemic white things I see on internet recipes. But all it was was sugar, water, pears and spices, cooked just right. I never had pears, and foolishly, never asked for her recipe.

I don't think the pears she used were much good for eating out of hand. Maybe she deliberately picked them early, or it wasn't the best variety for my parents' north Florida home, or just a manifestation of the tree's generally unsatisfactory nature. (More on that later).

I've often wondered if they were the same kind of pears that grew on my grandmother's farm in South Carolina. When I was little, taking the cows to and from the barn and pasture was a special treat. My Aunt Iola had us children "leading" Red, who not only was the dominant cow and knew perfectly well how to get where she was going, but also very affable and docile. My aunt really had to watch Jersey, a mean cow who would jump the fence into the cornfield at any opportunity.

Back to the pears. One of the delays in the daily journeys was caused by old pear trees. Their hard, inedible fruits littered the ground, and the cows scarfed down as many as they could before my aunt got impatient and hurried them along. They probably made good preserves if you got to them before the cows, but I was too young to wonder. Now that I'd like to ask there's nobody left to answer.

I am not sure if the pear tree my parents planted in north Florida every truly flourished. My parents said that they stood under it one winter debating whether to cut it down because it never "did" anything. Being unhurried folk, and not unkind, they granted it one more year, whereupon it bloomed and fruited gloriously, like it never had done before, and the whole family rejoiced over the resulting bounty of pear preserves.

Thereafter they made a ritual of standing under said tree every winter, threatening it gently or not so gently, with the prospect of ending it all. And from then on, as the story goes, the tree was a faithful producer in spite of its sorry appearance.

My mother has been dead for 4 years now, and my father even longer, but the pear tree remains - just barely. It's not so much clinging to life as gradually letting go. We survivors go back as often as we can, but there's nobody to give it a good scare, and worse, nobody to use whatever harvest there might be. So the non-doing pear tree persists -  a weathered sentinel from the golden-brown sweetness of a past time.
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I clipped this branchlet on a visit, but colored it after I returned to south Florida. I don't know whether the hard brown spheres were immature fruits or shriveled remnants. The leaves were bright green when I picked it, but turned their "fall" colors after a few days. Even though the sketch wouldn't be quite biologically accurate, I couldn't resist trying to capture these vibrant hues.