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muddy morning of grapefruit gleaning

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Posted by Zonie on July 19, 2020 at 05:37:21

The suburban sprawl of east-central Phoenix did not erase entirely its agrarian past. The infrastructure has in many areas been preserved. In some areas people water their lawns with the irrigation water previously used for crops instead of having to rely on the more expensive potable water. Then there are the orchards which were not completely destroyed. Near the intersection of 44th Street and Campbell Avenue are houses built among tall black date palm trees, evidence that this was once in the mid-20th Century a commercial date orchard. Further east in what was once the separate community of Arcadia but which is now incorporated into Phoenix, there are houses among orange trees in what was during that same era a commercial orange grove.

This conversion from orchard to residential while retaining many of the old trees sparked a fashion in some areas that had never been agricultural, like my own neighborhood which existed only since 1961, the fashion of planting fruit trees instead of those trees which were merely decorative, and from that fashion I have the grapefruit tree in the back yard. In these cases such trees had to be maintained with expensive city potable water, so it wasn't really an economical way to grow fresh fruit. People would have been better off financially just buying fruit at the store, but it was still a popular fashion. If I was tempted to think of the grapefruit I ate with breakfast in winter and spring as free, I remembered that part of the $300 per month water bills I paid in summer was for keeping that tree alive.

In 2016 I was diagnosed with GERD, not by a gastroenterologist but by an otolaryngologist. By some quirk of anatomy, it has presented, not as heartburn, which even now I seldom have, but as laryngospasms. Dr. Baldree said I must no longer eat grapefruit. There were still people among friends, family and co-workers to whom I could give grapefruit, so the tree served a purpose. The number has since diminished. My mountain climbing partner went on a statin and so couldn't eat grapefruit, and then his wife was diagnosed with GERD as well, so she couldn't eat them. Then this year my company changed ownership, so I couldn't give them to my boss's father anymore and another co-worker who liked them had retired.

By another quirk of fate it became difficult and inconvenient to buy such fresh fruit as my doctor advised, since the stores started closing earlier due to supposed supply and disinfection difficulties posed by a flu bug, and I could no longer go shopping after work on week nights. I could still buy proton pump inhibitors, as these are non-perishable, so I decided to go against medical advice, eat grapefruit from my tree, and take more proton pump inhibitors to mitigate any symptoms this caused.

This worked for a while, but soon the extreme heat converted the fructose into ethanol, which make the grapefruit unpalatable, and I saw some had fallen from the tree gnawed by the roof rats, and nobody likes a drunken roof rat. I decided at last I had to glean these grapefruit and throw them away. It's a pity for food to go to waste, but it had to be done. Maybe next winter I'll just collect it for food banks.

The temperature range today was from 91°F in the morning to 111°F in the afternoon, but I got an early start, and I cooled off further by reopening the backyard mud pit and having a good wallow. Coated with mud, I did my pushup workout and grabbed a pole to knock off the grapefruit that were visible from the outside of the tree. Having done that, the sun was getting higher in the sky, and the mud on me had dried and was no longer protecting me from the heat, so I ran the hose under the tree to water the tree, while I had another mud wallow in the pit. The pit was getting too warm to be refreshing, so with my new coating of mud, I headed under the shade of the tree to knock off grapefruit from underneath it, squishing my feet in the mud beneath the tree from the hose watering. I knocked those other grapefruit down with the pole and then threw those that fell under the tree out into the yard for more convenient collection and removal later. Mission accomplished, it was noon, and the heat was oppressive even in the shade of the tree. I hosed down and headed back indoors to the refuge of air conditioning.




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