LIKE most good
Americans, I grew up thinking that figs or more accurately fig, as a
non-discrete substance was
something made by man specifically to fill a soft rectangular cookie, probably
manufactured in the same big Midwestern dessert mill that produced things like
nougat and Twinkie filling and whatever sturdy white confection was used to
make candy cigarettes.
So when my wife
and I bought a house in
The woman,
Esther, told me that the tree was several decades old (I think she said 40
years, which in my retelling usually swelled to 60 or more, though an arborist
later broke it to me that the tree was probably no older than 30).
And it seemed to
me that the tree meant almost as much to her as the house, a narrow brownstone
where her Italian-American family had lived more or less since the 1930s, once
arrayed by generations among the four floors, one of the grandfathers stubbornly
residing at the top. From up there, during his time, he undoubtedly would have
been able to chart the comparative health of dozens of fig trees in the yards
neighboring his, planted by people trying hard to smuggle a little dream of
Neapolitan sweetness into a cold Northeastern climate.
When I inherited
this dream, my fig frankly didnt look like much
of a tree, any more than the low, gnarled mesquites that passed for trees in
the part of
But it was August
when we closed on the house, so the spindly branches were full of ripe brown
figs. And it didnt take long after eating a few
right off the tree honeylike and fragile, botanically not a fruit but an
enclosed inflorescence, a flower wrapped up in itself to understand why someone would try so
hard to grow an essentially Mediterranean tree at such an unfriendly
latitude.
When we moved to
this part of Park Slope, near
But they did the
job. In spring, green shoots unfurled from the brown branch tips, extending up
and out until their energy seemed to be sapped by the little figs that would
start to punch out by June. (Its never warm enough to make a spring crop;
the fruit falls off before growing much bigger than marbles.)
As the tree has
flourished, owning it has always felt like an outlandish urban luxury, akin to
having my own motorboat or squash court. It fulfills so many of what Ive slowly come to realize are my needs. Culinary, above
all: grilled figs, fresh figs with my Cheerios, figs braised with rabbit and pork
and duck, figs baked into pies and cakes, and bags of figs given away with a
kingly magnanimity. This summer Im finally going to learn how to make
preserves, partly to try to quell the annual heartbreak that follows when we go
away in late August and so many figs are lost, dropping to the ground, doing
alarming things to the dogs digestive tract.
For anyone with a
literary or quasi-religious bent, few trees can provide the same satisfaction.
Sitting in its shade in the late evening as the leaves lift slowly for the last
sunshine, showing their pale underbellies, you notice especially on a brown turkey fig, the
kind I have how perfectly the
leaves are shaped for postlapsarian modesty, at least
the male kind. You can imagine yourself in a line of fig lovers going back to
Adam and Aesop and Siddhartha, at least until a cargo jet on approach to
Kennedy rattles the windows and ruins the illusion.
Eight years after
I first laid eyes on it, my tree looks much more like a tree now. A few summers
ago, an evil pyracantha shrub that blocked some of
its sunlight was sacrificed in its honor. Even with years of no winter
wrapping, the fig has grown to more than a dozen feet, and Ive had to cut back branches that invade the path leading to
the back of the yard. Over the last few weeks, the tree has fully leafed out,
almost hiding the old compact discs Ive strung
among the branches to glint and scare off the sparrows that come for the
ripening figs, cruelly taking just a few bites and leaving the rest to rot.
More than
anything else, the tree has become my timekeeper, the true gauge of summer. The
season doesnt really begin
for me until I can see that deep, deep green from the kitchen window. It is at
its height when the figs fully fit the Spanish proverb, wearing the cloak
of a beggar and the eye of a widow. (The skin grows dark brown and
wrinkled when ripe; the little red oculus on the bottom of the fig opens and
starts to weep juice.)
And when I find
that last lone fig and pull it from the tree sometime in late September, I know
the sweet season has come to an end once again.