Eating A Fruit

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

What is success? Money, possessions, notoriety? Love? One day an answer came to me: to have the presence of mind to enjoy eating a good piece of fruit. The rest of it I find all too illusive.

Being a New Hampshire boy, I have a special place in my heart for apples. Walking into the shade of a barn filled with apples on a clear fall day, the air is permeated with their fragrance, this is heaven. Take an apple in your hand and consider it. The heft of it is all the juice contained in that skin. It is smooth and cool, rap on it with your knuckle, it has a hollow knock. Winter is coming. Study the skin, the blush and range of colors, the little spots and flecks. There may be a scar from where a bird pecked it. Polish it on your pant leg, twist and pull out the stem. And then bite into it. Things happen for all the senses. The crisp fruit crushes between your teeth, the juice spreads around in your mouth.

Stand there and eat the apple and pay attention to what you’re doing, and what the apple is all about. All of the business of growing and harvesting apples has come together for this. If you don’t have a barn full of apples or any other fruit, just one is sufficient. If you’re in the kitchen, look out the window. If you do this I hope like me, you will feel lucky to be alive and for those few moments at least, feel successful. When you are through eating the apple maybe throw the core off in a spot where some critter might find and eat it. Hold on to this experience as best you can as all the other definitions beg for attention.

Gordon Bunker