The Miraculous Pear Tree

We've been living here for ten years. A pear tree stands in the middle of the front part of the property, close to the house. This pear tree looked half dead and ready to give up; I can't remember when it bore fruit and when it didn't, but sometimes these sad-looking little pears would drop onto the ground and the deer would come and eat them, and sometimes there were no pears at all.

This year, and nobody around here knows why, our pear tree produced a good, big crop of luscious fruit. We don't know for sure what kind of pears they are, but they are in the family of "winter pears." Seckel pears are my favorite, especially when they are hard and almost ripe; this year's crop tastes like that but they are larger and sweeter.

I keep telling my husband that this is the happiest I've seen him in a while. He collected all the pears, using the large plastic buckets that cat litter comes in; then he went over to see Doris, our neighbor who I end up mentioning quite a bit. Doris has a huge assortment of preserved produce in her basement. Peter asked Doris to preserve the miraculous pears in glass jars, and of course Doris was full of joy; this is what she lives for.

This is what we live for also. This is why we came here in the first place. Before we moved here, in a suburb of Philadelphia, all we saw in our final years there were bulldozers and sculptured lawns and fake brick being glued onto the outside walls of conspicuous consumption houses; these house cost at least half a million dollars. Now, we have our pear tree which hopefully will bear fruit again.

My husband bought some calico fabric and colored yarn and made nice decorations for the pear jars; he printed out a label for each jar. Some people will get them as holiday gifts but we are saving a lot for ourselves. In the refrigerator yesterday I saw a pear jar holding pears mixed with strawberries; the juice from the pears made the strawberries taste so wonderful that I almost cried.