Bring an old shirt. Pants you don’t care about. Shoes you might not wear to the ball.
Expect to get a red stain around your mouth, sticky hands and bits of chewed-up fruit between your teeth.
All worth it. All good. All pomegranates and when we’re talking about pomegranates, we’re talking about a pomegranate party.
Pomegranate season comes twice, first in early September when people are faked out by branches sagging with large, green pomegranates and think, it’s time. It’s not time and won’t be time until the fruit turns red and the first pomegranate cracks.
Then it’s time to gather, eat and celebrate the fall miracle that is pomegranates.
Pomegranates can be unpredictable. The crop, lavish one year and six pomegranates-strong the next. Just when you think you’ve cornered the neighborhood market, one morning while inspecting your riches, you notice a leaf footed bug, a bug that does not come every year but when it does, it comes ugly and often.
A pomegranate tree — something between a tree and a bush — is no great looker itself. Branches can look like a bad haircut, shooting off in wild, unpredictable directions, going this way first and then that, as if the branch changed its mind in the middle of the night. The tree resists symmetry like a teenager does advice and its shape should be celebrated for innovation rather than compliance.
The crop is good this year, 40-ish, which may not be enough to make jam but will satisfy decorating needs for fall wreaths and the Thanksgiving table, for eating in the morning after a walk or a bike ride or in the afternoon as the culinary centerpiece for the neighborhood pomegranate party.
Interest in pomegranates picks up at the end of September and the first of October when they redden and ripen. Neighbors walk by and ask if they can pick one. Yes, because fruit is community and community is good.
A week ago, I noticed one that was cracked. This was the messenger pomegranate. The message was, “Sweet fruit is on the way.”
I halved, quartered and ate it, section by section.
A new pomegranate section, the seeds nestled together like red kernels of corn, is like a hillside of fresh powder. First you look, then you plunder.
It’s not right to keep this to yourself. Like a beach house, it’s more fun when you share the ocean blue with people like us.
The ideal age for a pomegranate party guest is between about 3 and 14. The age of wonder. The age of discovery. The age of appreciation.
Guests sit on the curb, grass or in the back of an old truck. The curb is good because you can split the pomegranates on the cement. The truck is good for sitting and then tossing the spent pomegranates into the gutter.
Last Friday, we had the 20th annual pomegranate party, the tree now 20 years old. We’ve seen a couple of generations and this one included our 4-year-old granddaughter, Nora, and her next-door neighbors, sisters Ari, 3, and 6-year-old Ivy.
Instructions were simple. Eat the seeds but don’t eat the white skin covering the seeds. The skin won’t kill you but neither will they compel you to attend the 21st party.
They pointed, I picked, twisting the pomegranates from the branch so as not to harvest the fruit often hanging centimeters away. We ate five. We could have eaten more but sometimes you have to leave some fish in the pond, sand dollars on the beach and pomegranates in the tree.
If the first rain doesn’t do them in, the second may and if it doesn’t, by December, the leaves will have dropped and blown away and the tree will be bare except fruit headed for mummification like shrunken heads.
It is a moment, a memory and a fall rite of passage that reminds me of Richard Brauntigan’s “In Watermelon Sugar.” Substitute pomegranates for watermelons:
“Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar and then traveled to the length of our dreams, along roads lined with pines and stones …
“Some of the bridges are made of watermelon sugar. I like those bridges best.”
October 13, 2020 at 01:45AM
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HERB BENHAM: It's pomegranate party time - The Bakersfield Californian
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Herb
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