We had a two nectarine trees in our garden when I was growing up. As the fruit was beginning to develop, I would eagerly await the first sign of redness and snaffle it straight from the tree and eat it. My timing was inevitably off, and it would be a hard green all the way through. So I would lob the once bitten fruit into the big circle garden.
It wasn’t that big, but when you’re 8 years old, the world seems impossibly big. It was the big circle garden because it had a path of broken asphalt that ran all the way around it. Mum could walk around the big circle garden in ten steps. To me, it seemed an impenetrable jungle of plants. Lobbing a green nectarine into the vast expanse of the untamed landscape seemed a sure way to avoid detection of my transgression of wasting food.
My mother would find these green, bitten fruits in the middle of this garden that she had taken two steps into to pull up a few weeds. Raising the fruit on high, she would demand to know who had only taken one bite and discarded the fruit.
The benefit of being one of eleven means the possibility of being discovered was remote. Luckily, Mum didn’t have moulds of our bites to match.
Forward 60 years, I sat in the doctor’s office, and he handed me 4 sheets of A4 paper, lists printed on both sides. Mostly the lists consisted of foods I was no longer allowed to eat if I wanted to regain a sensible use of my bowels.
Nectarines were on the list.
I love nectarines, I like them crunchy, not green because I don’t have a big circle garden anymore, not soft and squishy. Nectarines need a blush of red, firm and crunchy.
Nectarine season is almost here, I’ll just have to rely on my memory now.
