Emma and I walked around the fig tree looking for ripe fruit. For the first time in five years the fig tree was starting to produce. I had watched the small, green teardrop fruit appear in July and thought they would never ripen. Our dry July weather transitioned to August gulley washers and the water filled the figs to soft chestnut lantern-shaped fruit that dangled from the woody branches.
Emma scanned the tree and declared, “There are no ripe figs today!”
“They’re here,” I replied. “You can’t give up on figs that easily. You have to stick your head into the tree, behind the outside leaves.”
I stuck my head behind the curtain of fig leaves and was rewarded with a view of at least a dozen ripe figs within easy reach. I snapped them from the branches and cradled them in my left palm resting against my abdomen. I re-emerged from behind the leaves and handed Emma a fig. She and I stood for a minute each pulling back a fig stem then popping the whole fig into our mouths.
My daughter and I share this love of figs. We keep trying to educate those around us about this fruit flower that is as close to a sugar lump as Mother Nature can muster. Some folks, inexplicably, don’t like the sweetness. Others don’t like the faint roughness of the fig skin that brushes lightly on your tongue as you bite and swallow.
Emma finishes her fig this sunny August afternoon and says, “These are the best. These figs are a lot smaller than Mrs. White’s figs though. What kind of fig tree is this?”
Mrs. White is a friend who brings us a bag of figs from her tree every year. They are probably Brown Turkey which has a larger fruit than this that is not quite so sweet. “I don’t know what kind of fig tree this is,” I answer. “This fig tree came from my grandaddy’s tree. Grandaddy had an old tree behind his house that was there from my earliest memories. My daddy dug up a shoot from that fig tree and planted it at our house in Florida when I was little. During my years growing up that fig tree grew as tall as our two-story house, and it covered the entire side of the house. In Florida the figs got ripe in early July. I would climb up the sloping branches and sit near the top of the tree eating a tummy full of figs for breakfast every morning.”
Emma looked mesmerized at the idea of a fig tree the size of a house. Feasting on figs would certainly be her idea of eating heaven. “About five years ago, “I continued, “I dug up a young shoot from my daddy’s fig tree and brought it here. This fig tree has now been carried through three generations, but I don’t have any idea what exactly it is.”
Emma and I began to walk across the yard back to our own house. “I wish I could meet your grandaddy, my great grandaddy. I wish I could climb his fig tree.”
I smiled and tears filled my eyes and began to spill down my cheeks. Emma looked alarmed, “You’re crying.” she declared.
“I am,” I said looking into my daughter’s blue eyes. “My grandaddy would have liked to see you, too. You would have liked his yard filled with oranges, plums, peaches and an orchard of pecan trees. He loved growing all those things and he would have loved to share them with you.”
“Can we go see them now?” she asked.
“They’re gone,” I said smiling, “You know when grandaddy and Lovey died, the property was sold and now there’s a shopping center there. The trees are gone,” I said patting Emma on the head as we walked into the house.
Emma’s blue eyes remind me that grandaddy is not gone. Grandaddy, my mother’s father, had sky blue eyes just a shade bluer than Mom Wiess, my father’s mother. My mother and father both have green eyes and my two sisters and I have green eyes. Between us my sisters and I now have four children with a range of blue eyes, from bright Carolina sky blue to blue with a touch of silvery gray. These are blue eyes, silent through two generations, now back again in the bright eyes of our children. Just the way I know that I will find the brown sweet figs when I poke my head through the veil of leaves, I know grandaddy’s spirit is just as surely present behind the blue eyes of Emma, her brother and her cousins.