Loquats

There is a loquat tree in the courtyard where I live, and I noticed the other day that it is all covered in flower buds and it looks like its going to bear a lot of fruit. I read that they are a winter-bearing tree, but there were fruit on the tree when I moved here in May, and some remained through the summer, so I wasn’t sure. In any case, it looks to be true; the fruit I saw originally must have been leftovers. I’m very much looking forward to this season’s crop. I haven’t had an opportunity to eat, really eat and indulge in, loquats since I was a child. This past year or so, I have stumbled across one or two, but they weren’t ripe or tasty.

We had a loquat tree in the backyard where I was born, a tall mature old thing which produced heavy crops of fruit each year that were plump and covered is soft, downy skin which we would peel off before eating them. I have a memory of standing in the yard with my father and my sister, picking and eating loquats to our contentment. I would have been between 4 and 6 at this time, so I would have been too little to reach most of the good fruit myself; the tree was standing on a slope, so on one side there were branches that would be low enough for me to reach, but I assume that my dad was also picking better, higher fruit for us. This memory, which is perhaps a mashup of many similar memories, evokes a feeling of languid domestic contentment which has had a deep impact on my personal mythology and desires for my future.

Loquats don’t only evoke happy memories for me, however. After my parents divorced, my father’s girlfriend moved in a few months later. At some point during the 6 or 7 years which followed, the loquat tree got cut down. As I recall it, this was her idea, which my father simply went along with, having no particular opinion about it. Whether that is true or not, I don’t know. In any case, I was outraged, particularly because the justification for cutting down this beautiful fruit tree was that she wanted to start a garden in the flat shady patch of the yard behind the tree. To this day, I am still outraged about it, because not only was that the only shady spot in a large yard which could have accommodated a garden in many other places, but she mainly grew roses there. A fruit tree was traded for roses. Roses are lovely and all, but to me, given a choice between a fruit tree and flowers, I will always pick the tree. Always. A fruit tree takes a long time to mature, for one thing, so cutting one down to make way for roses, which are the poster child of fleeting beauty, strikes me as incredibly wasteful. Never mind that fact that you are trading a food bearing plant for one which only bears lovely flowers if you take exacting care of them. (I suppose the level of care demanded by roses depends on the variety and your own dedication, but I have always understood them to be troublesome plants.) What really drove the stake home for me was that fact that my father’s girlfriend never really developed any of the rest of the yard. There were tons of other places she could have planted her stupid roses, pleanty of ways she could have livened up and beautified the back yard without having to cut down the god damned loquat tree.

As you can see, my bitterness on this subject is still quite fresh, perpahs more so at the moment because I finally have a loquat tree again, which brings all these memories surging back up again. I may begin my reminises with happy memories of my dad and sister, but I always come back to the tree cutting in very short order. I have a long list of similar such grievances against my dad’s girlfriend, events both large and small which to my childish, fairytale-oriented mind always seemed to prove that she was in fact the evil stepmother of my life. As much as I love loquats, no other icon so aptly captures the enduring anger and bitterness I feel towards her.

Once the tree in my courtyard bears fruit this winter, it is my intention to save and plant seeds from the fruit I eat. Not only would I like to grow a new tree for myself, but I would like to start trees for my family and friends, and it is my sincere hope that doing so will help me heal over some of this old wound. The past is what it is, but the future is still open to choice, and I want to chose the one with less pain and more fruit trees.

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