Paw Paws

Needing to clear my head last Friday after a particularly hectic week, I took a long walk into the woods behind our Loudoun house. My mind buzzed with errands to run, reports to write, clients to call so I wasn't particularly aware of the sky, the trees, or the creek.

Until I stumbled upon a paw-paw. It surprised me -- the cool green fruit in the late summer leaves so far from anything cultivated. When I bent to pick it up, it felt soft and ripe in my hands and the fruit inside, when I cracked it open, had that familiar custard-like sweetness with the big black seeds shiny when I spit them out. There's simply no other taste like a wild paw-paw, and I remembered again that I was in Virginia, on an old carriage road along a creek bottom that had been used for centuries by homesteaders long before I was born.

Funny how taste brings Place alive. To this day, the tang of a green apple ignites sharp memories of my childhood home in Western New York where we used to pick bushels for apple pies. Unfortunately, the green apples from the supermarket don't spark the same memories --the perfect, waxed, refrigerated orbs taste like Any Place, without the pungence created from the earth and sun, worms and ants, rain and sky.