The Beginning of a Long Term Relationship

Loot from suburban foraging as a sophomore in high school

What compelled me to select the European pear, or Pyrus communis?

Aside from having nibbled on Bartletts from the grocery store, or eaten syrupy canned slices, I hadn't seriously considered the pear as a crop worth exploring until one day in high school when I took a different route home.

Turning onto Freedom Way, I instantly noticed the pear tree dominanting the front yard of small white house. Spending a great deal of my childhood driving down dirt roads with my grandmother in search of fiddleheads and wild berry batches trained me to have hawk eyes for freegan opportunities. It was late September, and I could smell the ripe and rot of the small yellow pears in the yard and smashed on the sidewalk. There were still small green fruit dangling from the graceful, sweeping limbs. I didn't hesitate to walk right up to the front door to knock and ask if they didn't mind me harvesting enough fruit to fill the milk crate fixed onto the back of my bicycle.

The homeowner answered the door with a baby on her hip, and said to help myself since her family didn't know what to do with them. I left with at least 12 lbs. piled into my backpack and bike basket, and overwhelmed my family with fruit salads, smoothies, and other uncreative uses of the pear for the following week.

It was far more exciting to have come upon a pear tree than anything else I'd found in town. Perhaps what made it feel like a real treasure (did anyone else notice this bounty?) was how rare the pear stood among the countless apple trees that grow wild along the roadsides or neatly cultivated in orchards all over Vermont. The more I considered it the more I couldn't seem to understand why the pear- so closely related to the apple- seems to live in the pomological shadow of it's rounder, redder counterpart?

I've always been attracted to the underdog kind fruit crops that don't receive much attention from the public, or the forgotten heirloom varieties that our grandparents knew. At one point in time, as I read in the article by Jules Janick called The Pear in History, Literature, Popular Culture, and Art, the pear was just as prominent as the apple in Europe, Asia, and the New World, valued for its early spring blossoms, graceful tree form, long term storage qualities, and ability to make strong, sweet alcoholic beverages.  

Here's to the beginning of an attempt to pay tribute to a crop by trying to learn everything about putting it to use and managing it. The pear has, after all, appealed to the tongues, stomaches, livelihoods, and aesthetics of the human race for thousands of years.