Persimmons

Monday and Tuesday mornings, a thin layer of frost coated my windshield.

The weather app on the phone said it was 37 degrees, so it wasn’t a freeze, but I figured, hey. It can’t be long before there actually is a freeze and I can start eating some of those persimmons staring back at me from the trees.

So I looked deeper into the weather app and discovered: we’re heading into a stretch of air conditioner weather for the next 10 days.

Lows in the upper 50s to mid-60s and highs in the 80s.

No freeze in sight, which distresses me more than it might most people.

I have had many a delicious breakfast eating persimmons at the edge of our woods. Eating the fibrous, seedy goodness that is a persimmon while listening to yonder crows cawing and gossiping in the distance. It’s the good life.

We have about a dozen persimmon trees, and this year they have a heavy crop. So heavy that some are falling already and the deer are coming up in the mornings to browse on them and acorns.

I have been eyeing the persimmons for a bit more than a month and waiting for that glorious day when the clouds part, the angels burst into song and we have a freeze hard enough to ripen the persimmons.

As I am sure you did, I learned as a tad that you don’t want to bite into an unripe persimmon. Your mouth and tongue pucker like you got an anesthetic from a dentist and things won’t taste right for a day or two.

But wait until a good, hard freeze and a persimmon becomes nature’s finest treat for man and beast. Unutterably delicious, and probably good for you.

Years ago, our persimmon trees sprouted in the woods and had to grow tall and slender to compete with the blackjacks and cedars around them. Today, they’re 40 feet tall, as big around as a coffee can, with only a few branches reachable from the ground.

There’s no picking persimmons off such trees, so I have to shake the trunk to loosen a few or throw a stick and knock them off the branches.

There are no Bible verses and no archaeological evidence to support this, but I am pretty sure the Garden of Eden was filled with pecan and persimmon trees, so Adam and Eve could hang out under the trees, cracking pecans with their pocket knives and plucking ripe persimmons from the trees.

It was a great life we could be enjoying today, except for that dern snake that came along peddling apples.

Instead, I’ll keep eyeing the trees and waiting for the freeze.