Pear Tree Quotes

Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.

As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.

She couldn’t make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom – a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung above him. He was a glance from God.

Ol' man Simon, planted a diamond. Grew hisself a garden the likes of none. Sprouts all growin' comin' up glowin' Fruit of jewels all shinin' in the sun. Colors of the rainbow. See the sun and the rain grow sapphires and rubies on ivory vines, Grapes of jade, just ripenin' in the shade, just ready for the squeezin' into green jade wine. Pure gold corn there, Blowin' in the warm air. Ol' crow nibblin' on the amnythyst seeds. In between the diamonds, Ol' man Simon crawls about pullin' out platinum weeds. Pink pearl berries, all you can carry, put 'em in a bushel and haul 'em into town. Up in the tree there's opal nuts and gold pears- Hurry quick, grab a stick and shake some down. Take a silver tater, emerald tomater, fresh plump coral melons. Hangin' in reach. Ol' man Simon, diggin' in his diamonds, stops and rests and dreams about one... real... peach.

For this, let gardens grow, where beelines end, sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia; where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise in pear trees, plum trees; bees are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom-a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.

February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, While torrential slush that roars Burns in the blackness of the spring. Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas, Race through the noice of bells and wheels To where the ink and all you grieving Are muffled when the rainshower falls. To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal, A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees, Fall down into the puddles, hurl Dry sadness deep into the eyes. Below, the wet black earth shows through, With sudden cries the wind is pitted, The more haphazard, the more true The poetry that sobs its heart out.

What the hell are you doing up there?' So he slipped, of course, because he was startled, and because fate, having been so kind to him as to award him this ecstasy, retributively was going to kill him now. He lost his footing and grabbed for the chimney but missed. Head over thighs he rolled out like a child's toy, smashed into the poking branches of the damn pear tree, which probably saved his life, breaking his fall. He landed with a thud on a bed of lettuces, and the wind was knocked out of him, mortifyingly so, through all available orifices. Oh, brilliant,' said the voice. 'The trees are dropping their fruits early this year.

I love bright words, words up and singing early; Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing; Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees; I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly, Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees, Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.

...the average Frenchman would shrug, as if to say: "These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we make a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make the changes that you suggest.

I sit up in bed and watch her fiddle about in the back of my wardrobe. I think she's got a plan. That's what's good about Zoey. She'd better hurry up though, because I'm starting to think of things like carrots. And air. And ducks. And pear trees. Velvet and silk. Lakes. I'm going to miss ice. And the sofa. And the lounge. And the way Cal loves magic tricks. And white things- milk, snow, swans.

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid.

Dear Samson, I put your hair in a jar by the pear tree near the well. I been thinkin’ over what I done and I still don’t think God gave you all that strength for you to kill my people. Love — Delilah

25. Flowering trees The blossom of the pear tree is the most prosaic, vulgar thing in the world. The less one sees this particular blossom the better...

What the light looks like in the pear trees, in October, is a hundred teardrops of gold, the whole orchard weeping.

The other travellers do seem to have given us a wide berth,” I admitted. “Can you blame them?” He surveyed our possessions, and I found myself smiling as well. “Not precisely a partridge in a pear tree...” “But we have a raven in a cage, a lurcher on a lead, a Siamese in a basket, and a dormouse in your décolletage. We are a travelling circus.

Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How? Why? It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears.

Oh to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?

Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity.

Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think.

This darkness is for sleeping, for escape; it's where I go when the other places ache with light; this is where I curl up and close my eyes and darkness flows like lava, and I dissapear into what, into nothing, into pure dark, into what there is before there is anything else.

Out of the city and over the hill, Into the spaces where Time stands still, Under the tall trees, touching old wood, Taking the way where warriors once stood; Crossing the little bridge, losing my way, But finding a friendly place where I can stay. Those were the days, friend, when we were strong And strode down the road to an old marching song When the dew on the grass was fresh every morn, And we woke to the call of the ring-dove at dawn. The years have gone by, and sometimes I falter, But still I set out for a stroll or a saunter, For the wind is as fresh as it was in my youth, And the peach and the pear, still the sweetest of fruit, So cast away care and come roaming with me, Where the grass is still green and the air is still free.

The woman leans the sadness of her body against the window, tries to look beyond the pear tree. Inside the story, she sees nothing but darkness. She is ungrateful for the luxury of despair.

I saw thee once - only once - years ago: I must not say how many - but not many. It was a July midnight; and from out A full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring, Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven, There fell a silvery-silken veil of light, With quietude, and sultriness, and slumber, Upon the upturn'd faces of a thousand Roses that grew in an enchanted garden, Where no wind dared stir, unless on tiptoe - Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses That gave out, in return for the love-light, Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death - Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses That smiled and died in the parterre, enchanted By thee, and by the poetry of thy presence. Clad all in white, upon a violet bank I saw thee half reclining; while the moon Fell upon the upturn'd faces of the roses, And on thine own, upturn'd - alas, in sorrow! Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight - Was it not Fate, (whose name is also Sorrow,) That bade me pause before that garden-gate, To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses? No footsteps stirred: the hated world all slept, Save only thee and me. (Oh, Heaven! - oh, G**! How my heart beats in coupling those two words!) Save only thee and me. I paused - I looked - And in an instant all things disappeared. (Ah, bear in mind the garden was enchanted!) The pearly lustre of the moon went out: The mossy banks and the meandering paths, The happy flowers and the repining trees, Were seen no more: the very roses' odors Died in the arms of the adoring airs. All - all expired save thee - save less than thou: Save only divine light in thine eyes - Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes. I saw but them - they were the world to me. I saw but them - saw only them for hours - Saw only them until the moon went down. What wild heart-histories seemed to lie enwritten Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres! How dark a wo! yet how sublime a hope! How silently serene a sea of pride! How daring an ambition! yet how deep - How fathomless a capacity for love! But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight, Into a western couch of thunder-cloud; And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained. They would not go - they never yet have gone. Lighting my lonely pathway home that night, They have not left me (as my hopes have) since. They follow me - they lead me through the years. They are my ministers - yet I their slave. Their office is to illumine and enkindle - My duty, to be saved by their bright fire, And purified in their electric fire, And sanctified in their elysian fire. They fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope,) And are far up in Heaven - the stars I kneel to In the sad, silent watches of my night; While even in the meridian glare of day I see them still - two sweetly scintillant Venuses, unextinguished by the sun!

In the summer the pear trees were fine. In the summer, all that is hideous about a pear tree is hidden by leaves and pears. But once those disguises were removed they were nothing but acres of murderous psychopaths emboldened by darkness.

I would rather live my life than not live it.

But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still.

Fourteen Kids, Two Dads, One Mom, Two Nannies, Two Tutors—and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.

The seed of God is in us: Pear seeds grow into pear trees; Hazel seeds into hazel trees; And God seeds into God. —Meister Eckehart

To Helen I saw thee once-once only-years ago; I must not say how many-but not many. It was a july midnight; and from out A full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring, Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven, There fell a silvery-silken veil of light, With quietude, and sultriness, and slumber Upon the upturn'd faces of a thousand Roses that grew in an enchanted garden, Where no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe- Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses That gave out, in return for the love-light Thier odorous souls in an ecstatic death- Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses That smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted by thee, by the poetry of thy prescence. Clad all in white, upon a violet bank I saw thee half reclining; while the moon Fell on the upturn'd faces of the roses And on thine own, upturn'd-alas, in sorrow! Was it not Fate that, on this july midnight- Was it not Fate (whose name is also sorrow) That bade me pause before that garden-gate, To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses? No footstep stirred; the hated world all slept, Save only thee and me. (Oh Heaven- oh, God! How my heart beats in coupling those two worlds!) Save only thee and me. I paused- I looked- And in an instant all things disappeared. (Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!) The pearly lustre of the moon went out; The mossy banks and the meandering paths, The happy flowers and the repining trees, Were seen no more: the very roses' odors Died in the arms of the adoring airs. All- all expired save thee- save less than thou: Save only the divine light in thine eyes- Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes. I saw but them- they were the world to me. I saw but them- saw only them for hours- Saw only them until the moon went down. What wild heart-histories seemed to lie enwritten Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres! How dark a woe! yet how sublime a hope! How silently serene a sea of pride! How daring an ambition!yet how deep- How fathomless a capacity for love! But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight, Into western couch of thunder-cloud; And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained. They would not go- they never yet have gone. Lighting my lonely pathway home that night, They have not left me (as my hopes have) since. They follow me- they lead me through the years. They are my ministers- yet I thier slave Thier office is to illumine and enkindle- My duty, to be saved by thier bright light, And purified in thier electric fire, And sanctified in thier Elysian fire. They fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope), And are far up in heaven- the stars I kneel to In the sad, silent watches of my night; While even in the meridian glare of day I see them still- two sweetly scintillant Venuses, unextinguished by the sun!

A Wild Woman Is Not A Girlfriend. She Is A Relationship With Nature. But can you love me in the deep? In the dark? In the thick of it? Can you love me when I drink from the wrong bottle and slip through the crack in the floorboard? Can you love me when I’m bigger than you, when my presence blazes like the sun does, when it hurts to look directly at me? Can you love me then too? Can you love me under the starry sky, shaved and smooth, my skin like liquid moonlight? Can you love me when I am howling and furry, standing on my haunches, my lower lip stained with the blood of my last kill? When I call down the lightning, when the sidewalks are singed by the soles of my feet, can you still love me then? What happens when I freeze the land, and cause the dirt to harden over all the pomegranate seeds we’ve planted? Will you trust that Spring will return? Will you still believe me when I tell you I will become a raging river, and spill myself upon your dreams and call them to the surface of your life? Can you trust me, even though you cannot tame me? Can you love me, even though I am all that you fear and admire? Will you fear my shifting shape? Does it frighten you, when my eyes flash like your camera does? Do you fear they will capture your soul? Are you afraid to step into me? The meat-eating plants and flowers armed with poisonous darts are not in my jungle to stop you from coming. Not you. So do not worry. They belong to me, and I have invited you here. Stay to the path revealed in the moonlight and arrive safely to the hut of Baba Yaga: the wild old wise one… she will not lead you astray if you are pure of heart. You cannot be with the wild one if you fear the rumbling of the ground, the roar of a cascading river, the startling clap of thunder in the sky. If you want to be safe, go back to your tiny room — the night sky is not for you. If you want to be torn apart, come in. Be broken open and devoured. Be set ablaze in my fire. I will not leave you as you have come: well dressed, in finely-threaded sweaters that keep out the cold. I will leave you naked and biting. Leave you clawing at the sheets. Leave you surrounded by owls and hawks and flowers that only bloom when no one is watching. So, come to me, and be healed in the unbearable lightness and darkness of all that you are. There is nothing in you that can scare me. Nothing in you I will not use to make you great. A wild woman is not a girlfriend. She is a relationship with nature. She is the source of all your primal desires, and she is the wild whipping wind that uproots the poisonous corn stalks on your neatly tilled farm. She will plant pear trees in the wake of your disaster. She will see to it that you shall rise again. She is the lover who restores you to your own wild nature.

Hmm, What did I love? I think all the scents. Mama's lilac trees, and the wild iris in the fields, and rain on the breeze on a hot day. Apple and pear blossoms. The hay just cut. The mix of odors in the barn when the sunlight was shafting through the cracks in the boards, heating everything up.

Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appears, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds - the invisible shared out in endless abundance.

February Boris Pasternak It's February. Get ink. Weep. Write the heart out about it, sing Another song of February While raucous slush burns black with spring. Six grivnas* for a buggy ride Past booming bells, on screaming gears, Out to a place where drizzles fall Louder than any ink or tears Where like a flock of charcoal pears, A thousand blackbirds, ripped awry From trees to puddles, knock dry grief Into the deep end of the eye. A thaw patch blackens underfoot. The wind is gutted with a scream. True verses are the most haphazard, Rhyming the heart out on a theme. *Grivna: a unit of currency.

I passed a pear tree drifted with white blossoms. A fish splashed in the moonlit river. With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and villas were lined up in cramped, neat rows which ran toward the tip of the peninsula. p94

Phee glared at them. “If anyone tries to take bacon from me, I’m going to turn them into a tree. And not a good tree. A bad one, like a Bradford pear tree.” They stared at her. She threw up her hands. “Have I taught you nothing? The Bradford pear tree has thorns and the flowers smell like tuna. No one has ever said, oh gee, let me get a good, long sniff of fish flowers.

I wanted to describe to him how the emotional intimacy growing between us was shattering my heart in the most life-affirming ways, but I didn’t have the right words, except to say that I loved him, which wasn’t nearly enough. We spent that night, and every night together after, in a closeness I had never known, or even thought possible with another person. I was happy. Truly content. Drifting to sleep in Bilal’s arms, I thought about the hills beyond the terrace. Soon wild plum, peach, pear, fig, medlar, mulberry, date, and almond trees would bloom.

Like an inspired and prolific poet, who never refuses to spread beauty to the humblest places, which until now did not seem to share the domain of art, the sun still warmed the bountiful energy of the dung heap, of the unevenly paved yard, and of the pear tree worn down like an old serving maid.

Theft is punished by Your law, O Lord, and by the law written in men's hearts, which iniquity itself cannot blot out. For what thief will suffer a thief? Even a rich thief will not suffer him who is driven to it by want. Yet had I a desire to commit robbery, and did so, compelled neither by hunger, nor poverty through a distaste for well-doing, and a lustiness of iniquity. For I pilfered that of which I had already sufficient, and much better. Nor did I desire to enjoy what I pilfered, but the theft and sin itself. There was a pear-tree close to our vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was tempting neither for its colour nor its flavour. To shake and rob this some of us wanton young fellows went, late one night (having, according to our disgraceful habit, prolonged our games in the streets until then), and carried away great loads, not to eat ourselves, but to fling to the very swine, having only eaten some of them; and to do this pleased us all the more because it was not permitted.Behold my heart, O my God; behold my heart, which You had pity upon when in the bottomless pit. Behold, now, let my heart tell You what it was seeking there, that I should be gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved to perish. I loved my own error— not that for which I erred, but the error itself. Base soul, falling from Your firmament to utter destruction— not seeking anything through the shame but the shame itself!

Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of weekday services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing; liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine, not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations.

Oh to be a pear tree—any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!

Ha!: He laughed. "Almost all of them as a kid, but most recently it was my nose...for the seventh time. And I've had two concussions, three broken fingers, and a partridge in a pear tree.

He looked at the houses he had been passing these weeks and though he had never studied them carefully they had become familiar through the process of seeing them so often, and he was now impressed with the change in their appearance as he looked at them through the gray of the air and whiteness of the snow, each house, shrub, tree, bush and mailbox trimmed with snow and blending into the air as if they were just a picture projected upon the still, pearly grayness, just an impression created by the silent snow, a picture on the edge and verge of disappearing and leaving only the air and snow through which he now lightly walked. It did not seem possible, but the air was even softer and quieter. He continued walking alongside his prints feeling he could walk forever, that as long as the silent snow continued falling he could continue walking, and as he did he would leave behind all worries and cares, all horrors of the past and future. There would be nothing to bother him or torture his mind and fill his body with tremors of fear, the dark night of the soul over. There would only be himself and the soft, silent snow; and each flake, in its own life, its own separate and distinct entity, would bring with it its own joy, and he would easily partake of that joy as he continued walking, the gentle, silent snow falling ever so quietly, ever so joyously ... yes, and ever so love-ing-ly ... loveing-ly....

It was the breeze that made her look up, a change in the texture of the unseen, a change in the texture of her heart. She was ready. Charlotte moved with firm footing around a stand of beech trees and onto a moonbeam path. A pearly, full moon glowed over Red Mountain, burning back the curtains of night.

I went back in and grabbed my running clothes, then changed in the bathroom. I opened the door to the bathroom, stopping when I saw Kaidan's toiletry bag on the sink. I was overcome with curiosity about his cologne or aftershave, because I'd never smelled it on anyone else before. Feeling sneaky, I prodded one finger into the bag and peeked. No cologne bottle. Only a razor, shaving cream, toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant. I picked up the deodorant, pulled off the lid, and smelled it. Nope, that wasn't it. The sound of Kaidan's deep chuckle close to the doorway made me scream and drop the deodorant into the sink with a clatter. I smacked one hand to my chest and grabbed the edge of the sink with the other. He laughed out loud now. “Okay, that must have looked really bad.” I spoke to his reflection in the mirror, then fumbled to pick up the deodorant. I put the lid on and dropped it in his bag. “But I was just trying to figure out what cologne you wear.” My face was on fire as Kaidan stepped into the small bathroom and leaned against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest. I stepped away. He seemed entertained by my predicament. “I haven't been wearing any cologne.” “Oh.” I cleared my throat. “Well, I didn't see any, so I thought it might be your deodorant, but that's not it either. Maybe it's your laundry detergent or something. Let's just forget about it.” “What is it you smell, exactly?” His voice took on a husky quality, and it felt like he was taking up a lot of room. I couldn't bring myself to look at him. Something strange was going on here. I stepped back, hitting the tub with my heel as I tried to put the scent into words. “I don't know. It's like citrus and the forest or something...leaves and tree sap. I can't explain it.” His eyes bored into mine while he wore that trademark sexy smirk, arms still crossed. “Citrus?” he asked. “Like lemons?” “Oranges mostly. And a little lime, too.” He nodded and flicked his head to the side to get hair out of his eyes. Then his smile disappeared and his badge throbbed. “What you smell are my pheromones, Anna.” A small, nervous laugh burst from my throat. “Oh, okay, then. Well...” I eyed the small space that was available to pass through the door. I made an awkward move toward it, but he shifted his body and I stepped back again. “People can't usually smell pheromones,” he told me. “You must be using your extra senses without realizing it. I've heard of Neph losing control of their senses with certain emotions. Fear, surprise...lust.” I rubbed my hands up and down my upper arms, wanting nothing more than to veer this conversation out of the danger zone. “Yeah, I do have a hard time reining in the scent sometimes,” I babbled. “It even gets away from me while I sleep now and then. I wake up thinking Patti's making cinnamon rolls and it ends up being from someone else's apartment. Then I'm just stuck with cereal. Anyway...” “Would you like to know your own scent?” he asked me. My heart swelled up big in my chest and squeezed small again. This whole scent thing was way too sensual to be discussed in this small space. Any second now my traitorous body would be emitting some of those pheromones and there'd be red in my aura. “Uh, not really,” I said, keeping my eyes averted. “I think I should probably go.” He made no attempt to move out of the doorway. “You smell like pears with freesia undertones.” “Wow, okay.” I cleared my throat, still refusing eye contact. I had to get out of there. “I think I'll just...” I pointed to the door and began to shuffle past him, doing my best not to brush up against him. He finally took a step back and put his hands up by his sides to show that he wouldn't touch me. I broke out of the confined bathroom and took a deep breath.

In my memories I have set my life in Brooklyn between pieces of glass, separate from my current existence, and this has enabled me to move forward. The past cannot tie me in knots, nor can it cause me to drown. And yet what is stored in glass belongs to me still. Each piece is a part of me: the hummingbirds, the locked doors, Mr. Morris in the yard, the pear tree, the woman covered by bees, and you. Especially you.

Pretty Words" Poets make pets of pretty, docile words: I love smooth words, like gold-enamelled fish Which circle slowly with a silken swish, And tender ones, like downy-feathred birds: Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds, Come to my hand, and playful if I wish, Or purring softly at a silver dish, Blue Persian kittens fed on cream and curds. I love bright words, words up and singing early; Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing; Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees; I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly, Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees, Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.

and there she was standing on the grass, which seemed to have turned green, and with the sun pouring down on her and warm sweet wafts about her and the fluting and twittering and singing coming from every bush and tree. She clasped her hands for pure joy and looked up in the sky and it was so blue and pink and pearly and white and flooded with springtime light that she felt as if she must flute and sing aloud herself

I don’t want to walk home past the pear trees when it’s over, each of us dissecting the merits of Duke’s performance. I want to be asleep when they get back. I want them all to keep their voices down for fear of waking me.

Sometimes on flat boring afternoons, he'd squatted on the curb of St. Deval Street and daydreamed silent pearly snowclouds into sifting coldly through the boughs of the dry, dirty trees. Snow falling in August and silvering the glassy pavement, the ghostly flakes icing his hair, coating rooftops, changing the grimy old neighborhood into a hushed frozen white wasteland uninhabited except for himself and a menagerie of wonder-beasts: albino antelopes, and ivory-breasted snowbirds; and occasionally there were humans, such fantastic folk as Mr Mystery, the vaudeville hypnotist, and Lucky Rogers, the movie star, and Madame Veronica, who read fortunes in a Vieux Carré tearoom.

If we are cultivating fruit in an orchard, we wish that particular fruit to grow in its own way; we give it the soil it needs, the amount of moisture, the amount of care, but we do not treat the apple tree as we would the pear tree or the peach tree as we would the vineyard on the hillside. Each is allowed the freedom of its own kind and the result is the perfection of growth which can be accomplished in no other way. The time must come when the same freedom is allowed the individual; each in his own way must develop according to nature's purpose, the body must be but the channel for the expression of purpose, interest, emotion, labor. Everywhere freedom must be the sign of reason.

The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is, and accordingly its fruits will be God-natured. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, God-seed into God.

When American experts began making "helpful" suggestions about how the French could "increase productivity and profits" the average Frenchman would shrug, as if to say: "These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we have a nice little business here just as it is. Everybody makes a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make the changes that you suggest.

The days of winter enter in, The darkness nibbles at the days, The heavy clouds pull down the sky, The first deep snowfall stays, and grays. Too long to wait for springtime now Here in this cold and darkening room, Only time for remembering The pear trees all in bloom.

THE ORGANIC FOODS MYTH A few decades ago, a woman tried to sue a butter company that had printed the word 'LITE' on its product's packaging. She claimed to have gained so much weight from eating the butter, even though it was labeled as being 'LITE'. In court, the lawyer representing the butter company simply held up the container of butter and said to the judge, "My client did not lie. The container is indeed 'light in weight'. The woman lost the case. In a marketing class in college, we were assigned this case study to show us that 'puffery' is legal. This means that you can deceptively use words with double meanings to sell a product, even though they could mislead customers into thinking your words mean something different. I am using this example to touch upon the myth of organic foods. If I was a lawyer representing a company that had labeled its oranges as being organic, and a man was suing my client because he found out that the oranges were being sprayed with toxins, my defense opening statement would be very simple: "If it's not plastic or metallic, it's organic." Most products labeled as being organic are not really organic. This is the truth. You pay premium prices for products you think are grown without chemicals, but most products are. If an apple is labeled as being organic, it could mean two things. Either the apple tree itself is free from chemicals, or just the soil. One or the other, but rarely both. The truth is, the word 'organic' can mean many things, and taking a farmer to court would be difficult if you found out his fruits were indeed sprayed with pesticides. After all, all organisms on earth are scientifically labeled as being organic, unless they are made of plastic or metal. The word 'organic' comes from the word 'organism', meaning something that is, or once was, living and breathing air, water and sunlight. So, the next time you stroll through your local supermarket and see brown pears that are labeled as being organic, know that they could have been third-rate fare sourced from the last day of a weekend market, and have been re-labeled to be sold to a gullible crowd for a premium price. I have a friend who thinks that organic foods have to look beat up and deformed because the use of chemicals is what makes them look perfect and flawless. This is not true. Chemical-free foods can look perfect if grown in your backyard. If you go to jungles or forests untouched by man, you will see fruit and vegetables that look like they sprouted from trees from Heaven. So be cautious the next time you buy anything labeled as 'organic'. Unless you personally know the farmer or the company selling the products, don't trust what you read. You, me, and everything on land and sea are organic. Suzy Kassem, Truth Is Crying

And then the leaves break out on the trees, and the petals drop from the fruit trees and carpet the earth with pink and white. The centers of the blossoms swell and grow and color: cherries and apples, peaches and pears, figs which close the flower in the fruit. All California quickens with produce, and the fruit grows heavy, and the limbs bend gradually under the fruit so that little crutches must be placed under them to support the weight.

It is such a mistake to assume that practicing dharma will help us calm down and lead an untroubled life; nothing could be further from the truth. Dharma is not a therapy. Quite the opposite, in fact; dharma is tailored specifically to turn your life upside down—it’s what you sign up for. So when your life goes pear-shaped, why do you complain? If you practice and your life fails to capsize, it is a sign that what you are doing is not working. This is what distinguishes the dharma from New Age methods involving auras, relationships, communication, well-being, the Inner Child, being one with the universe, and tree hugging. From the point of view of dharma, such interests are the toys of samsaric beings—toys that quickly bore us senseless.

Many of you know little about storytelling. Before I begin, let me explain. The Story is the story of us all. If understood properly, it is of immense power. It tells you who you are, what you might expect from this life. Some believe it can foretell the future. Mastery of the Story gives you mastery over life itself. It contains precious, holy relics of the age of giants which preceded us. It tells of our rise, our glories and our occasional disgraces. It tells of our fathers and grandfathers, of the animals and the trees and the spirits, containing all the knowledge you need to please them so they will help rather than punish you.

Does Carthage even have forests? Did Virgil know for sure or was it just convenient for his story? Virgil was a professional liar. This would not be the only place where he pruned the truth until it was as artificial as an espaliered pear tree against a wall, forced into an expedient shape and bearing the demanded fruit.

She couldn’t make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom—a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God. So

I passed a pear tree with white blossoms. A fish splashed in the moonlit river. With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

Only a few acres but still, we have pears and they will have to come off the trees. Everything does.

I passed a pear tree drifted with white blossoms. A fish splashed in a moonlit river. With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognise what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

Poem in October" It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water praying and call of seagull and rook And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall Myself to set foot That second In the still sleeping town and set forth. My birthday began with the water- Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days. High tide and the heron dived when I took the road Over the border And the gates Of the town closed as the town awoke. A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder, Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly Come in the morning where I wandered and listened To the rain wringing Wind blow cold In the wood faraway under me. Pale rain over the dwindling harbour And over the sea wet church the size of a snail With its horns through mist and the castle Brown as owls But all the gardens Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud. There could I marvel My birthday Away but the weather turned around. It turned away from the blithe country And down the other air and the blue altered sky Streamed again a wonder of summer With apples Pears and red currants And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide. And the mystery Sang alive Still in the water and singingbirds. And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun. It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. O may my heart's truth Still be sung On this high hill in a year's turning.

So he raced from dogwood to blossoming peach. When they thinned out he headed for the cherry blossoms, then magnolia, chinaberry, pecan, walnut and prickly pear. At last he reached a field of apple trees whose flowers were just becoming tiny knots of fruit. Spring sauntered north, but he had to run like hell to keep it as his traveling companion. From February to July he was on the lookout for blossoms. When he lost them, and found himself without so much as a petal to guide him, he paused, climbed a tree on a hillock and scanned the horizon for a flash of pink or white in the leaf world that surrounded him. He did not touch them or stop to smell. He merely followed in their wake, a dark ragged figure guided by the blossoming plums.

There was something wonderful about the atmosphere at Stony Cross Park. One could easily imagine it as some magical place set in some far-off land. The surrounding forest was so deep and thick as to be primeval in appearance, while the twelve-acre garden behind the manor seemed too perfect to be real. There were groves, glades, ponds, and fountains. It was a garden of many moods, alternating tranquility with colorful tumult. A disciplined garden, every blade of grass precisely clipped, the corners of the box hedges trimmed to knife blade crispness. Hatless, gloveless, and infused with a sudden sense of optimism, Annabelle breathed deeply of the country air. She skirted the edge of the terraced gardens at the back of the manor and followed a graveled path set between raised beds of poppies and geraniums. The atmosphere soon became thick with the perfume of flowers, as the path paralleled a drystone wall covered with tumbles of pink and cream roses. Wandering more slowly, Annabelle crossed through an orchard of ancient pear trees, sculpted by decades into fantastic shapes. Farther off, a canopy of silver birch led to woodland beds that appeared to melt seamlessly into the forest beyond.

As they pushed through the door a remarkable sight met their eyes: the Muskrat was sitting in the fork of a tree eating a pear. "Where's mother?" asked Moomintroll. "She's trying to get your father out of his room," replied the Muskrat, bitterly. "This is what comes of collecting plants. I've never quite trusted that Hemulen. Well, I hope the Muskrat heaven is a peaceful place, because I shan't be here much longer.

Bonnie had arranged for the whole family to volunteer at a homeless shelter on Christmas morning. “I just hate all that crass commercialism of Christmas, don’t you?” she’d told Madeline last week, when they’d run into each other in the shops. Madeline had been doing Christmas shopping, and her wrists were looped with dozens of plastic shopping bags. Fred and Chloe were both eating lollipops, their lips a garish red. Meanwhile Bonnie was carrying a tiny bonsai tree in a pot, and Skye was walking along next to her eating a pear. (“A fucking pear,” Madeline had told Celeste later. For some reason she couldn’t get over the pear.)

squirrel is in a pine tree, when all of a sudden, it starts shaking. He looks down, and sees an elephant climbing the tree. ‘What are you doing? Why are you climbing my tree?’ the squirrel calls down to the elephant. ‘I’m coming up there to eat some pears!’ the elephant responds. ‘You fool! This is a pine tree! There aren’t any pears up here!’ The elephant looks perplexed for a moment, and then says, ‘Well, I brought my own pears.

The Langhe is a paradise, a giardino: pears, apples, pomegranates, chestnuts. Everything you could want to eat falling from a tree. And above all, nocciole. You see those trees? Those are South American hazelnuts. Fatter. Rounder. There are also the smaller Turkish hazelnuts, but Ferrero Rocher uses the big ones to make Nutella. And wine- everywhere, wine. Barbera, Bonarda, Dolcetto, and the king, Nebbiolo, the king of all grapes.

Wild Peaches" When the world turns completely upside down You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore; We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color. Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor, We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown. The winter will be short, the summer long, The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong; All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all. The squirrels in their silver fur will fall Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot. 2 The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold. The misted early mornings will be cold; The little puddles will be roofed with glass. The sun, which burns from copper into brass, Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass. Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover; A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year; The spring begins before the winter’s over. By February you may find the skins Of garter snakes and water moccasins Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear. 3 When April pours the colors of a shell Upon the hills, when every little creek Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell, When strawberries go begging, and the sleek Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak, We shall live well — we shall live very well. The months between the cherries and the peaches Are brimming cornucopias which spill Fruits red and purple, sombre-bloomed and black; Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback. 4 Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones There’s something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There’s something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones. I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray, Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves; That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath, Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

Roses climbed the shed, entwined with dark purple clematis, leaves as glossy as satin. There were no thorns. Patience's cupboard was overflowing with remedies, and the little barn was often crowded with seekers. The half acre of meadow was wild with cosmos and lupine, coreopsis, and sweet William. Basil, thyme, coriander, and broad leaf parsley grew in billowing clouds of green; the smell so fresh your mouth watered and you began to plan the next meal. Cucumbers spilled out of the raised beds, fighting for space with the peas and beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and bright yellow peppers. The cart was righted out by the road and was soon bowed under glass jars and tin pails of sunflowers, zinnias, dahlias, and salvia. Pears, apples, and out-of-season apricots sat in balsa wood baskets in the shade, and watermelons, some with pink flesh, some with yellow, all sweet and seedless, lined the willow fence.

Beaumont's intention was to promote the virtue and nutritional value of fruit-bearing trees. Fifteen different genera of fruit and a number of their different species are described in the work: almonds, apricots, a barberry, cherries, quinces, figs, strawberries, gooseberries, apples, a mulberry, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, and raspberries. Each colored plate illustrates the plant's seed, foliage, blossom, fruit, and sometimes cross sections of the species.

Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom- apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the 'Mittel Land' ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillside like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told that this road is in summertime excellent, but that it had not been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadors would not repair them, lest the Turks should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point. Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colors of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water.

The french language is emotive. The verbs are strong and definite. The nouns are masculine or french. I could never understand why the farm would be feminine yet the farmhouse masculine; the pear and apple trees masculine yet the fruit feminine.

Even with her failing vision, Violet West could see the scars. They had turned purple, almost red, from the icy cold, the color of the pears on the tree in the yard, the color of blood that can't be washed away and of things that can never be undone.

The world is sharp. So sharply in focus that my eyes see everything—in fact, beyond everything, if one can suspend the logic of that sentence. If you show me a painting of a bowl with citrons and figs and plums and pears, I can describe the woman who picked the fruit off the tree, and can describe her with such tenderness that I can see myself reflected in her iris, like a candle, the sole source of light. Show me a painting of a ray fish, dripping sea off a kitchen table, and I'll tell you about the man who caught it.

The mist was very dark in here, white and wet, and the cobwebs festooning the gaunt tree trunks were weighed down with thousands of shimmering, pear-shaped crystals. But it was not cold. Only still and secret and private, a hushed world within a world… They followed the sound, and after a while found a clearing, not open to the sky but clear on the ground. Long, wet grass stood there, and pine needles lay dark around the feet of the surrounding trees. In the centre, a well of water bubbled up and trickled away through the grass in two little channels already grooved in the spongy turf… Together they approached the spring, laying Aricia’s bronze coin and his own gold ring in the ice-cold, pure water, and for a moment they stayed there, hypnotised by the quiet tinkle of the gushing water.

All next day in the house and store she thought resisting thoughts about Tea Cake. She even ridiculed him in her mind and was a little ashamed of the association. But every hour or two the battle had to be fought all over again. She couldn’t make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom—a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.

Somewhere there was a book of love, with all the symptoms written down in red ink: Dizziness and Desire. A tendency to stare at the night sky, searching for a message that might be found up above. A lurching in the pit of the stomach, as if something much too sweet had been eaten. The ability to hear the quietest sounds--snails munching the lettuce leaves, moths drinking nectar from the overripe pears on the tree by the fence, a rabbit trembling in ivy-just in case he might be there, which was what mattered all along. Real hunger, just to see him, as if this would ever be enough.

Great stems rose about me, uplifting a thick multitudinous roof above me of branches, and twigs, and leaves-- the bird and insect world uplifted over mine, with its own landscapes, its own thickets, and paths, and glades, and dwellings; its own bird-ways and insect-delights. Great boughs crossed my path; great roots based the tree-columns, and mightily clasped the earth, strong to lift and strong to uphold. It seemed an old, old forest, perfect in forest ways and pleasure. And when, in the midst of this ectasy, I remembered that under some close canopy of leaves, by some giant stem, or in some mossy cave, or beside some leafy well, sat the lady of marble, whom my songs had called forth into the outer world, waiting (might it not be?) to meet and thank her deliverer in a twilight which would veil her confusion, the whole night became one dream-realm of joy, the central form of which was everywhere present, although unbeheld. Then, remembering how my songs seemed to have called her form the marble, piercing through the pearly shroud of alabaster -- "Why," thought I, "should not my voice reach her now, through the ebon night that inwraps her." My voice burst into song so spontaneously that it seemed involuntarily:

I was drawn on. Conscious now that something needed doing, I moved ever higher on the land. Here entering an orchard of immense and archaic beauty. I say orchard: The trees were dense in one place, scattered in another, as though planted by random throw, but all were heavy trunked and capaciously limbed, and they were fruit trees, every one of them. Apples, gold-skinned apricots, immaculate pears. The leaves about them were thick and cool and stirred at my approach; touched with a finger, they imparted a palpable rhythm. It took a long while to traverse the orchard. I began to feel hungry but didn't pause; though all this fruit appeared perfectly available, I felt prodded to appear before the master. The place had a master! Realizing this, I know he was already aware of me - comforting and fearful knowledge. Still I wanted to see him. The farther I went the more I seemed to know or remember abut him - the way he'd planted this orchard, walking over the hills, casting seed from his hand. I kept moving.

This was mainly a brown country, cluttered with dead leaves from the year before, but the oaks had tasseled and the redbud limbs were like flames in the wind. Fruit trees in cabin yards, peach and pear and occasional quince, were sheathed with bloom, white and pink, twinkling against broken fields and random cuts of new grass washed clean by the rain.

I've read every letter that you've sent me these past two years. In return, I've sent you many form letters, with the hope of one day being able to give you the proper response you deserve. But the more letters you wrote to me, and the more of yourself you gave, the more daunting my task became. I'm sitting beneath a pear tree as I dictate this to you, overlooking the orchards of a friend's estate. I've spent the past few days here, recovering from some medical treatment that has left me physically and emotionally depleted. As I moped about this morning, feeling sorry for myself, it occurred to me, like a simple solution to an impossible problem: today is the day I've been waiting for. You asked me in your first letter if you could be my protege. I don't know about that, but I would be happy to have you join me in Cambridge for a few days. I could introduce you to my colleagues, treat you to the best curry outside India, and show you just how boring the life of an astrophysicist can be. You can have a bright future in the sciences, Oskar. I would be happy to do anything possible to facilitate such a path. It's wonderful to think what would happen if you put your imagination toward scientific ends. But Oskar, intelligent people write to me all the time. In your fifth letter you asked, "What if I never stop inventing?" That question has stuck with me. I wish I were a poet. I've never confessed that to anyone, and I'm confessing it to you, because you've given me reason to feel that I can trust you. I've spent my life observing the universe, mostly in my mind's eye. It's been a tremendously rewarding life, a wonderful life. I've been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers.But I wish I were a poet. Albert Einstein, a hero of mine, once wrote, "Our situation is the following. We are standing in front of a closed box which we cannot open." I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the vast majority of the universe is composed of dark matter. The fragile balance depends on things we'll never be able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Life itself depends on them. What's real? What isn't real? Maybe those aren't the right questions to be asking. What does life depend on? I wish I had made things for life to depend on. What if you never stop inventing? Maybe you're not inventing at all. I'm being called in for breakfast, so I'll have to end this letter here. There's more I want to tell you, and more I want to hear from you. It's a shame we live on different continents. One shame of many. It's so beautiful at this hour. The sun is low, the shadows are long, the air is cold and clean. You won't be awake for another five hours, but I can't help feeling that we're sharing this clear and beautiful morning. Your friend, Stephen Hawking

They drank from a spring which filled an ancient stone trough behind the ruin. Beyond it lay overgrown beds and plants John had never set eyes on before: tall resinous fronds, prickly shrubs, long grey-green leaves hot to the tongue. Nestling among them he found the root whose scent drifted among the trees like a ghost, sweet and tarry. He knelt and pressed it to his nose. 'That was called silphium.' His mother stood behind him. 'It grew in Saturnus's first garden.' She showed him the most ancient trees in the orchards, their gnarled trunks cloaked in grey lichen. Palm trees had grown there too once, she claimed. Now even their stumps had gone. Each day, John left the hearth to forage in the wreckage of Belicca's gardens. His nose guided him through the woods. Beyond the chestnut avenue, the wild skirrets, alexanders and broom grew in drifts. John chased after rabbits or climbed trees in search of birds' eggs. He returned with mallow seeds or chestnuts that they pounded into meal then mixed with water and baked on sticks. The unseasonal orchards yielded tiny red and gold-streaked apples, hard green pears and sour yellow cherries.

Ode to the Beloved’s Hips" Bells are they—shaped on the eighth day—silvered percussion in the morning—are the morning. Swing switch sway. Hold the day away a little longer, a little slower, a little easy. Call to me— I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock right now—so to them I come—struck-dumb chime-blind, tolling with a throat full of Hosanna. How many hours bowed against this Infinity of Blessed Trinity? Communion of Pelvis, Sacrum, Femur. My mouth—terrible angel, ever-lasting novena, ecstatic devourer. O, the places I have laid them, knelt and scooped the amber—fast honey—from their openness— Ah Muzen Cab’s hidden Temple of Tulúm—licked smooth the sticky of her hip—heat-thrummed ossa coxae. Lambent slave to ilium and ischium—I never tire to shake this wild hive, split with thumb the sweet- dripped comb—hot hexagonal hole—dark diamond— to its nectar-dervished queen. Meanad tongue— come-drunk hum-tranced honey-puller—for her hips, I am—strummed-song and succubus. They are the sign: hip. And the cosign: a great book— the body’s Bible opened up to its Good News Gospel. Alleluias, Ave Marías, madre mías, ay yay yays, Ay Dios míos, and hip-hip-hooray. Cult of Coccyx. Culto de cadera. Oracle of Orgasm. Rorschach’s riddle: What do I see? Hips: Innominate bone. Wish bone. Orpheus bone. Transubstantiation bone—hips of bread, wine-whet thighs. Say the word and healed I shall be: Bone butterfly. Bone wings. Bone Ferris wheel. Bone basin bone throne bone lamp. Apparition in the bone grotto—6th mystery— slick rosary bead—Déme la gracia of a decade in this garden of carmine flower. Exile me to the enormous orchard of Alcinous—spiced fruit, laden-tree—Imparadise me. Because, God, I am guilty. I am sin-frenzied and full of teeth for pear upon apple upon fig. More than all that are your hips. They are a city. They are Kingdom— Troy, the hollowed horse, an army of desire— thirty soldiers in the belly, two in the mouth. Beloved, your hips are the war. At night your legs, love, are boulevards leading me beggared and hungry to your candy house, your baroque mansion. Even when I am late and the tables have been cleared, in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake. O, constellation of pelvic glide—every curve, a luster, a star. More infinite still, your hips are kosmic, are universe—galactic carousel of burning comets and Big Big Bangs. Millennium Falcon, let me be your Solo. O, hot planet, let me circumambulate. O, spiral galaxy, I am coming for your dark matter. Along las calles de tus muslos I wander— follow the parade of pulse like a drum line— descend into your Plaza del Toros— hands throbbing Miura bulls, dark Isleros. Your arched hips—ay, mi torera. Down the long corridor, your wet walls lead me like a traje de luces—all glitter, glowed. I am the animal born to rush your rich red muletas—each breath, each sigh, each groan, a hooked horn of want. My mouth at your inner thigh—here I must enter you—mi pobre Manolete—press and part you like a wound— make the crowd pounding in the grandstand of your iliac crest rise up in you and cheer.

If she thought of the labor and resources that went into each piece of fruit—the water, the light, the earth, the training and harvesting of each plant—a box of apples could be special, a sacred thing. Perhaps in this land of plenty, of myth and wide-open spaces, trucks and factories, mass production, we lost track of that: the miracle of an object as simple as a pear, nutritious and sweet, created by something as beautiful as a tree.

I know a beautiful garden, where there are a great many children in fine little coats, and they go under the trees and gather beautiful apples and pears, cherries and plums; they sing and run about and are as happy as they can be. Sometimes they ride on nice little ponies, with golden bridles and silver saddles. I asked the man whose garden it is, “What little children are these?” And he told me, “They are little children who love to pray and learn and are good.

Then Bacchus and Silenus and the Maenads began a dance, far wilder than the dance of the trees; not merely a dance of fun and beauty (though it was that too) but a magic dance of plenty, and where their hands touched, and where their feet fell, the feast came into existence- sides of roasted meat that filled the grove with delicious smells, and wheaten cakes and oaten cakes, honey and many-colored sugars and cream as thick as porridge and as smooth as still water, peaches, nectarines, pomegranates, pears, grapes, straw-berries, raspberries- pyramids and cataracts of fruit. Then, in great wooden cups and bowls and mazers, wreathed with ivy, came the wines; dark, thick ones like syrups of mulberry juice, and clear red ones like red jellies liquefied, and yellow wines and green wines and yellow-green and greenish-yellow. But for the tree people different fare was provided. When Lucy saw Clodsley Shovel and his moles scuffling up the turf in various places (when Bacchus had pointed out to them) and realized that the trees were going to eat earth it gave her rather a shudder. But when she saw the earths that were actually brought to them she felt quite different. They began with a rich brown loam that looked almost exactly like chocolate; so like chocolate, in fact, that Edmund tried a piece of it, but he did not find it all nice. When the rich loam had taken the edge off their hunger, the trees turned to an earth of the kind you see in Somerset, which is almost pink. They said it was lighter and sweeter. At the cheese stage they had a chalky soil, and then went on to delicate confections of the finest gravels powdered with choice silver sand. They drank very little wine, and it made the Hollies very talkative: for the most part they quenched their thirst with deep draughts of mingled dew and rain, flavored with forest flowers and the airy taste of the thinnest clouds.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.

While he digs he is free to let his mind wander, and he dreams his kingdom of pear trees in the orchard across to his left, growing skywards, gnarling, putting forth fat green soft fruits with ease each year. The trees that already grow in the orchards he loves almost as women in his life; the Catherine pear, the Chesil or pear Nouglas, the great Kentish pear, the Ruddick, the Red Garnet, the Norwich, the Windsor, the little green pear ripe at Kingsdon Feast; all thriving where they were planted in his father's ground at Lytes Cary before the management of the estate became his own responsibility as the eldest son. So much has happened these last six years since his father handed over and left for his house in Sherborne: there have been births and deaths - Anys herself was taken from him only last year. But the pear trees live on, reliably flowering and yielding variable quantities as an annual crop that defines the estate, and he has plans to add more.

Your jam puts store-bought to shame. As I ate it on a fresh croissant from the French bakery at the Farmers Market down the street from my house, I savored the image you painted with your words. I would love to spend a summer morning in the Pacific Northwest sunshine picking wild blackberries. I also crave your backyard access to crisp apples, plums, and pears, although I am not sure I would trade them for the grapefruit and oranges I pluck from my own trees for breakfast whenever I like.

The Sparrow Sisters' roses still bloomed on New Year's Day, their scent rich and warm even when snow weighted their petals closed. When customers came down the rutted road to the small eighteenth-century barn where the sisters worked, they marveled at the jasmine that twined through the split-rail fence, the perfume so intense they could feel it in their mouths. As they paid for their purchases, they wondered (vaguely, it must be said, for the people of Granite Point knew not to think too hard about the Sisters) how it was that clematis and honeysuckle climbed the barn in November and the morning glories bloomed all day. The fruit trees were so fecund that the peaches hung on the low branches, surrounded by more blossoms, apples and pears ripened in June and stayed sweet and fresh into December. Their Italian fig trees were heavy with purple teardrop fruit only weeks after they were planted. If you wanted a tomato so ripe the juice seemed to move beneath the skin, you needed only to pick up a punnet at the Nursery.

Yes, love is just something that you can feel. Like the rain on a warm spring day. Like the blossoms from the pear trees landing on your shoulders, as I walk, you’re walking down the path to the bridge, similar to the haze from the golden fields; it all reminds me of when I got everything I ever wanted. I remember Lily as she was to me, I believed at the time that- ‘The spaces between our fingers were created so that we could fill them in as we held hands; She was just the right size for me in every way.’ I still love her, even though she is still with me it is not the same, yet I love my new life also, yet why could I have it all, in my life? Yes, I feel that I have walked in the center of the valley of death, and she has comforted me. I would say that she is looking over me; she comforts me as much as she can. But- then it is not having her here, in her earthly body. It can be hard having faith in something that cannot be expressed in words. But- that is what remembering life is about, having faith that there is a plan for everything.

Hosbitaii may have originally evolved from plants, they don’t consider our plant life as having consciousness. Apparently the Hosbitaii attempted to communicate with a prickly pear when they first landed, with predictably bad results, and Indy apparently spent a half hour trying to convince a Joshua tree to drive him to a tsurrispoinis before he abducted you, so the Hosbitaii have decided that plants are too far down the evolutionary scale to count. I got the idea they’re annoyed by that, as if their own side had let them down.

And now gay-plumaged birds of all sorts began to warble in the trees, and with their varied and gladsome notes seemed to welcome and salute the fresh morn that was beginning to show the beauty of her countenance at the gates and balconies of the east, shaking from her locks a profusion of liquid pearls; in which dulcet moisture bathed, the plants, too, seemed to shed and shower down a pearly spray, the willows distilled sweet manna, the fountains laughed, the brooks babbled, the woods rejoiced, and the meadows arrayed themselves in all their glory at her coming.

The forno in Cortona bakes a crusty bread in their wood oven, a perfect toast. Breakfast is one of my favorite times because the mornings are so fresh, with no hint of the heat to come. I get up early and take my toast and coffee out on the terrace for an hour with a book and the green-black rows of cypresses against the soft sky, the hills pleated with olive terraces that haven't changed since the seasons were depicted in medieval psalters. Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me.

and it was November, and the mist was thicker than ever and very wet—the grass was wet with it, the gaunt tree was wet with it, I was wet with it, and the sandwiches were wet with it. Nobody's spirits can keep up under such conditions; and as I ate the soaked sandwiches, I deplored the headlong courage more with each mouthful that had torn me from a warm, dry home where I was appreciated, and had brought me first to the damp tree in the damp field, and when I had finished my lunch and dessert of cold pears, was going to drag me into the midst of a circle of unprepared and astonished cousins.

Her departure left no traces but were speedily repaired by the coming of spring. The sun growing warmer, and the close season putting an end to the Marquess's hunting, it was now Odo's chief pleasure to carry his books to the walled garden between the castle and the southern face of the cliff. This small enclosure, probably a survival of medieval horticulture, had along the upper ledge of its wall a grass walk commanding the flow of the stream, and an angle turret that turned one slit to the valley, the other to the garden lying below like a tranquil well of scent and brightness: its box trees clipped to the shape of peacocks and lions, its clove pinks and simples set in a border of thrift, and a pear tree basking on its sunny wall. These pleasant spaces, which Odo had to himself save when the canonesses walked there to recite their rosary, he peopled with the knights and ladies of the novelle, and the fantastic beings of Pulci's epic: there walked the Fay Morgana, Regulus the loyal knight, the giant Morgante, Trajan the just Emperor and the proud figure of King Conrad; so that, escaping thither from the after-dinner dullness of the tapestry parlour, the boy seemed to pass from the most oppressive solitude to a world of warmth and fellowship.

But despite heavy clouds, a feeling of contentment hangs in the air, coming from the kitchen's ability to be two things at once: to be an enclosed space that effectively opens up the world through taste and flavor and imagination. Nature comes in here. Pomegranate seeds on rice dishes, a strip of orange peel for a negroni, or a ribbon of lemon skin for a martini. A lime wedge for gin. A bowl of ripening pears. A jar of dates. Peaches roasted in rose water and stuffed with marzipan. Blackberries scattered on pancakes. Apricots cinched in chutney. Memories of melons, and the vine pergolas and fruit trees of summer, of prized Uzbek cherries carried in boxes across borders. The kitchen is an orchard.

What do you want to compare me to, one of those cultivated trees? The hawthorn, the pear, the orange, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs—when their fruit is ripe they get plucked, and that is an insult. Their large branches are bent, their small branches are pruned. Thus do their abilities embitter their lives. That is why they die young, failing to fully live out their Heaven-given lifespans. They batter themselves with the vulgar conventions of the world, as do all the other things of the world. As for me, I’ve been working on being useless for a long time. It almost killed me, but I’ve finally managed it—and it is of great use to me! If I were useful, do you think I could have grown to be so great?

Fides, Spes Joy is come to the little Everywhere; Pink to the peach and pink to the apple, White to the pear. Stars are come to the dogwood, Astral, pale; Mists are pink on the red-bud, Veil after veil. Flutes for the feathery locusts, Soft as spray; Tongues of the lovers for chestnuts, poplars, Babbling May. Yellow plumes for the willows’ Wind-blown hair; Oak trees and sycamores only Comfortless bare. Sore from steel and the watching, Somber and old,— Wooing robes for the beeches, larches, Splashed with gold; Breath o’ love to the lilac, Warm with noon.— Great hearts cold when the little Beat mad so soon. What is their faith to bear it Till it come, Waiting with rain-cloud and swallow, Frozen, dumb?

And off she went with a crock of marmalade and a bottle of red currant wine tied up in colored tissue paper. She reached the Blairs' as the last shard of blue daylight turned plummy. What had been the storefront window was now lit with candles. A woolly fir tree stood tall in the middle, its needled boughs drooping ever so slightly under the weight of twinkling glass ornaments, candy canes, and small pears balanced on top of them. An army of guests' presents, in every color of paper and ribbon, had been stacked beneath. one of the little Pye boys stole a peppermint off the tree and raced to the corner to devour it. A fiddle and a fife trilled out carols, and from the sway of the crowd inside, Marilla knew they were already dancing. She took in the night: home and friends and all that she cherished.

My mother had a passion for all fruit except oranges, which she refused to allow in the house. She named each one of us, on a seeming whim, after a fruit and a recipe- Cassis, for her thick black-currant cake. Framboise, her raspberry liqueur, and Reinette after the reine-claude greengages that grew against the south wall of the house, thick as grapes, syrupy with wasps in midsummer. At one time we had over a hundred trees (apples, pears, plums, gages, cherries, quinces), not to mention the raspberry canes and the fields of strawberries, gooseberries, currants- the fruits of which were dried, stored, made into jams and liqueurs and wonderful cartwheel tarts on pâte brisée and crème pâtissière and almond paste. My memories are flavored with their scents, their colors, their names. My mother tended them as if they were her favorite children. Smudge pots against the frost, which we base every spring. And in summer, to keep the birds away, we would tie shapes cut out of silver paper onto the ends of the branches that would shiver and flick-flack in the wind, moose blowers of string drawn tightly across empty tin cans to make eerie bird-frightening sounds, windmills of colored paper that would spin wildly, so that the orchard was a carnival of baubles and shining ribbons and shrieking wires, like a Christmas party in midsummer. And the trees all had names. Belle Yvonne, my mother would say as she passed a gnarled pear tree. Rose d'Aquitane. Beurre du Roe Henry. Her voice at these times was soft, almost monotone. I could not tell whether she was speaking to me or to herself. Conference. Williams. Ghislane de Penthièvre. This sweetness.

Sunday Morning V She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love Whispered a little out of tenderness, She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears On disregarded plate. The maidens taste And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. VI Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang? Why set the pear upon those river-banks Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? Alas, that they should wear our colors there, The silken weavings of our afternoons, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. VII Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest. VIII She hears, upon that water without sound, A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay." We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings

... the exotic spices arriving daily from the East Indies and the Americas, the crates of sweet oranges and bitter lemons from Sicily, the apricots from Mesopotamia, the olive oil from Naples, the almonds from the Jordan valley... I have seen and smelled these delicacies at market. But does any English person know how to cook with such foods? I think back to my time in France and Italy, of all the delicacies that passed across my tongue. And then to the gardens I've seen in Tonbridge with their raised beds of sorrel, lettuce, cucumbers, marrows, pumpkins. Already the banks are starred bright with blackberries and rose hips, with damsons and sour sloes, the bloom still upon them. Trees are weighted down with green apples and yellow mottled pears and crab apples flushed pink and gold. Soon there will be fresh cobnuts in their husks, and ripe walnuts, and field mushrooms, and giant puffballs.

Look,’ said Giovanni, as we crossed the river. ‘This old whore, Paris, as she turns in bed, is very moving.’ I looked out, beyond his heavy profile, which was grey—from fatigue and from the light of the sky above us. The river was swollen and yellow. Nothing moved on the river. Barges were tied up along the banks. The island of the city widened away from us, bearing the weight of the cathedral; beyond this, dimly, through speed and mist, one made out the individual roofs of Paris, their myriad, squat chimney stacks very beautiful and vari-colored under the pearly sky. Mist clung to the river, softening that army of trees, softening those stones, hiding the city’s dreadful corkscrew alleys and dead-end streets, clinging like a curse to the men who slept beneath the bridges—one of whom flashed by beneath us, very black and lone, walking along the river. ‘Some rats have gone in,’ said Giovanni, ‘and now other rats come out.

You have been led astray, my child, by the conflicting and vain opinions of mankind. You, like many others in the world, delight to question, to speculate, to weigh this, to measure that, with little or no profit to yourself or your fellow-creatures. And you have come freshly from a land where, in the great Senate-house, a poor perishable lump of clay calling itself a man, dares to stand up boldly and deny the existence of God, while his compeers, less bold than he, pretend a holy displeasure, yet secretly support him — all blind worms denying the existence of the sun; a land where so-called Religion is split into hundreds of cold and narrow sects, gatherings assembled for the practice of hypocrisy, lip-service and lies — where Self, not the Creator, is the prime object of worship; a land, mighty once among the mightiest, but which now, like an over-ripe pear, hangs loosely on its tree, awaiting but a touch to make it fall!

She maneuvered a cart through the produce section, which featured boxes of fruits as gifts, amping up the volume and variety this time of year. She packed several Asian pears in a plastic tear-off bag, then moved on to the most perfect Fuyu persimmons, smooth, orange, and firm. She had always been embarrassed when her mother had given people such odd practical "Korean gifts" - the boxes of apples or even laundry detergent - when in reality, outside of America, these objects might have some rich symbolic relevance that perhaps Margot didn't understand. If she thought of the labor and resources that went into each piece of fruit - the water, the light, the earth, the training and harvesting of each plant - a box of apples could be special, a sacred thing. Perhaps in this land of plenty, of myth and wide-open spaces, trucks and factories, mass production, we lost track of that: the miracle of an object as simple as a pear, nutritious and sweet, created by something as beautiful as a tree.

On account of their puny size and disappointing taste, in France wild pears are known as "poires d'angoisse" or pears of anguish. In Versailles, though, in the kitchen garden, pears are bred for pleasure. Of the five hundred pear trees, the best usually fruit in January--- the royal favorite, a type called "Bon Chrétien d'Hiver," or "Good Christian of Winter." Each pear is very large--- the blossom end engorged, the eye deeply sunk--- whilst the skin is a finely grained pale yellow, with a red blush on the side that has been touched by the sunlight. It is known for its brittle, lightly scented, almost translucent flesh that drips with a sugary juice; that soaks your mouth when your teeth sink into it. The gardener here, Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, says that when a pear is ripe its neck yields to the touch and smells slightly of wet roses. This winter they have not ripened, though, but have frozen to solid gold. Murders of crows sit on the branches of the pear trees, pecking at the rime of them. They have become fairy fruit; those dangling impossibilities. What would you give to taste one? Spring always comes, though. Is it not magic? The world's deep magic. March brings the vast respite of thaw, that huge unburdening, that gentling--- all winter's knives and jaws turning soft and blunt; little chunks of ice riding off on their own giddy melt; everything dripping and plipping and making little streams and rivulets; tender pellucid fingers feeling their way towards the sea; all the tiny busywork. And with the returning sun, too, sex. Tulips, first found as wild flowers in Central Asia--- named for the Persian word "tulipan," for turban--- thrust and bow in the warm soil of Versailles, their variegated "broken" petals licked with carmine flames. The early worm-catchers begin their chorus, skylarks and song thrushes courting at dawn. Catkins dangle like soft, tiny pairs of elven stockings. Fairy-sized wigs appear on the pussy willows. Hawthorn and sloe put on their powder and patches, to catch a bee's eye.

That night, Marjan dreamt of Mehregan. The original day of thanksgiving, the holiday is celebrated during the autumn equinox in Iran. A fabulous excuse for a dinner party, something that Persians the world over have a penchant for, Mehregan is also a challenge to the forces of darkness, which if left unheeded will encroach even on the brightest of flames. Bonfires and sparklers glitter in the evening skies on this night, and in homes across the country, everyone is reminded of their blessings by the smell of roasting 'ajil', a mixture of dried fruit, salty pumpkin seeds, and roasted nuts. Handfuls are showered on the poor and needy on Mehregan, with a prayer that the coming year will find them fed and showered with the love of friends and family. In Iran, it was Marjan's favorite holiday. She even preferred it to the bigger and brasher New Year's celebrations in March, anticipating the festivities months in advance. The preparations would begin as early as July, when she and the family gardener, Baba Pirooz, gathered fruit from the plum, apricot, and pear trees behind their house. Along with the green pomegranate bush, the fruit trees ran the length of the half-acre garden. Four trees deep and rustling with green and burgundy canopies, the fattened orchard always reminded Marjan of the bejeweled bushes in the story of Aladdin, the boy with the magic lamp. It was sometimes hard to believe that their home was in the middle of a teeming city and not closer to the Alborz mountains, which looked down on Tehran from loftier heights. After the fruit had been plucked and washed, it would be laid out to dry in the sun. Over the years, Marjan had paid close attention to her mother's drying technique, noting how the fruit was sliced in perfect halves and dipped in a light sugar water to help speed up the wrinkling. Once dried, it would be stored in terra-cotta canisters so vast that they could easily have hidden both both young Marjan and Bahar. And indeed, when empty the canisters had served this purpose during their hide-and-seek games.

Clearings opened on either side. Familiar smells drifted in the air: fennel, skirrets and alexanders, then wild garlic, radishes and broom. John looked about while his mother tramped ahead. Then a new scent rose from the wild harvest, strong in John's nostrils. He had smelt it the night the villagers had driven them up the slope. Now, as his mother pushed through a screen of undergrowth, he saw its origin. Ranks of fruit trees rose before him, their trunks shaggy with lichen, their branches decked with pink and white blossom. John and his mother walked forward into an orchard. Soon apple trees surrounded them, the sweet scent heavy in the air. Pears succeeded them, then cherries, then apples again. But surely the blossom was too late, John thought. Only the trees' arrangement was familiar for the trunks were planted in diamonds, five to a side. He knew it from the book. The heavy volume bumped against his mother's leg. He gave her a curious look but she seemed unsurprised by the orchards. As the scent of blossom faded, another teased his nostrils, remembered from the same night. Lilies and pitch. Looking ahead, John saw only a stand of chestnuts overwhelmed by ivy, the glossy leaves blurring the trunks and boughs into a screen.

Sheltered Garden" I have had enough. I gasp for breath. Every way ends, every road, every foot-path leads at last to the hill-crest-- then you retrace your steps, or find the same slope on the other side, precipitate. I have had enough-- border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, herbs, sweet-cress. O for some sharp swish of a branch-- there is no scent of resin in this place, no taste of bark, of coarse weeds, aromatic, astringent-- only border on border of scented pinks. Have you seen fruit under cover that wanted light-- pears wadded in cloth, protected from the frost, melons, almost ripe, smothered in straw? Why not let the pears cling to the empty branch? All your coaxing will only make a bitter fruit-- let them cling, ripen of themselves, test their own worth, nipped, shrivelled by the frost, to fall at last but fair With a russet coat. Or the melon-- let it bleach yellow in the winter light, even tart to the taste-- it is better to taste of frost-- the exquisite frost-- than of wadding and of dead grass. For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life. I want wind to break, scatter these pink-stalks, snap off their spiced heads, fling them about with dead leaves-- spread the paths with twigs, limbs broken off, trail great pine branches, hurled from some far wood right across the melon-patch, break pear and quince-- leave half-trees, torn, twisted but showing the fight was valiant. O to blot out this garden to forget, to find a new beauty in some terrible wind-tortured place.

One finds oneself surprisingly supplied with information. Outside the undifferentiated forces roar; inside we are very private, very explicit, have a sense indeed, that it is here, in this little room, that we make whatever day of the week it may be. Friday or Saturday. A shell forms upon the soft soul, nacreous, shiny, upon which sensations tap their beaks in vain. On me it formed earlier than on most. Soon I could carve my pear when other people had done dessert. I could bring my sentence to a close in a hush of complete silence. It is at that season too that perfection has a lure. One can learn Spanish, one thinks, by tying a string to the right toe and waking early. One fills up the little compartments of one’s engagement book with dinner at eight; luncheon at one-thirty. One has shirts, socks, ties laid out on one’s bed. But it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always deep below it, even when we arrive punctually at the appointed time with our white waistcoats and polite formalities, a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights—elm trees, willow trees, gardeners sweeping, women writing—that rise and sink even as we hand a lady down to dinner. While one straightens the fork so precisely on the table-cloth, a thousand faces mop and mow. There is nothing one can fish up in a spoon; nothing one can call an event. Yet it is alive too and deep, this stream. Immersed in it I would stop between one mouthful and the next, and look intently at a vase, perhaps with one red flower, while a reason struck me, a sudden revelation.

Circulation of Song after Rumi Once again I'm climbing the mountain Circle on circle like a winding rose Below me the mountains fall away like rose-petals I wish to be at the centre of the mystic rose Where I shall meet Him He shall greet me: Beloved! So long in coming -- He shall be the lonely pine tree On the flattened promontory And I, the spider clinging to Him by a mere thread, against the sun and the wind Each dawn the sunrise tinting gold the burnt Sienna houses Each dusk the alpine rosy glow on the mountain Each afternoon such darkness in the glen Fold on fold in a foliage all the shades of green: They have crept into my dream He is the air I breathe Purest mountain-air: I'm cleaned He is the lark's descant And in the evening, the nightingale He is the star's ascent and the moon's cloud-hiding He is all the circles and in this circulation of song: I read you / you read me circulating In my blood from head to heel He is the fruit of my unfulfilled life The peach pooped with juice And running with the Argentine waters, the pear In the Chinese nectarine flecked like a child's cheek with red And in the sour loquat and the sweet cherry In the fragrance of the jasmine of India And the Shiraz rose that makes the bee mad for them In the grape that becomes wine to suffuse my cheek In the olive that becomes a lamp to shine through my cupped hands In these and not only in these does He circulate Pouring from the sun at 5' o'clock as if at noon Dancing on the lake, pure honey And all the chatter over tea! But in the quiet you find me out You find me out Plucking myself from Me So that I become you The breath in my nape-nerve Sweetly saying: I bow to the God in you

A strange structure untangled itself out of the background like a hallucination, not part of the natural landscape. It was a funny-shaped, almost spherical, green podlike thing woven from living branches of trees and vines. A trellis of vines hung down over the opening that served as a door. Wendy was so delighted tears sprang to her eyes. It was her Imaginary House! They all had them. Michael wanted his to be like a ship with views of the sea. John had wanted to live like a nomad on the steppes. And Wendy... Wendy had wanted something that was part of the natural world itself. She tentatively stepped forward, almost swooning at the heavy scent of the door flowers. Languorously lighting on them were a few scissorflies, silver and almost perfectly translucent in the glittery sunlight. Their sharp wings made little snickety noises as they fluttered off. Her shadow made a few half-hearted attempts to drag back, pointing to the jungle. But Wendy ignored her, stepping into the hut. She was immediately knocked over by a mad, barking thing that leapt at her from the darkness of the shelter. "Luna!" Wendy cried in joy. The wolf pup, which she had rescued in one of her earliest stories, stood triumphantly on her chest, drooling very visceral, very stinky dog spit onto her face. "Oh, Luna! You're real!" Wendy hugged the gray-and-white pup as tightly as she could, and it didn't let out a single protest yelp. Although... "You're a bit bigger than I imagined," Wendy said thoughtfully, sitting up. "I thought you were a puppy." Indeed, the wolf was approaching formidable size, although she was obviously not yet quite full-grown and still had large puppy paws. She was at least four stone and her coat was thick and fluffy. Yet she pranced back and forth like a child, not circling with the sly lope Wendy imagined adult wolves used. You're not a stupid little lapdog, are you?" Wendy whispered, nuzzling her face into the wolf's fur. Luna chuffed happily and gave her a big wet sloppy lick across the cheek. "Let's see what's inside the house!" As the cool interior embraced her, she felt a strange shudder of relief and... welcome was the only way she could describe it. She was home. The interior was small and cozy; plaited sweet-smelling rush mats softened the floor. The rounded walls made shelves difficult, so macramé ropes hung from the ceiling, cradling halved logs or flat stones that displayed pretty pebbles, several beautiful eggs, and what looked like a teacup made from a coconut. A lantern assembled from translucent pearly shells sat atop a real cherry writing desk, intricately carved and entirely out of place with the rest of the interior. Wendy picked up one of the pretty pebbles in wonder, turning it this way and that before putting it into her pocket. "This is... me..." she breathed. She had never been there before, but it felt so secure and so right that it couldn't have been anything but her home. Her real home. Here there was no slight tension on her back as she waited for footsteps to intrude, for reality to wake her from her dreams; there was nothing here to remind her of previous days, sad or happy ones. There were no windows looking out at the gray world of London. There was just peace, and the scent of the mats, and the quiet droning of insects and waves outside. "Never Land is a... mishmash of us. Of me," she said slowly. "It's what we imagine and dream of- including the dreams we can't quite remember.

Pulling her head back, Lillian stared at him with wondering eyes, her lips damp and reddened. Her hands left his hair, her fingertips coming to the hard angles of his cheekbones, delicate strokes of coolness on the blazing heat of his skin. He bent his head, nuzzling his jaw against the pale silk of her palm. “Lillian,” he whispered, “I’ve tried to leave you alone. But I can’t do it anymore. In the past two weeks I’ve had to stop myself a thousand times from coming to you. No matter how often I tell myself that you are the most inappropriate…” He paused as she squirmed suddenly, twisting and craning her neck to look down at the floor. “No matter what I— Lillian, are you listening to me? What the devil are you looking for?” “My pear. I dropped it, and— oh, there it is.” She broke free of him and sank to her hands and knees, reaching beneath a chair. Pulling out the brandy bottle, she sat on the floor and held it in her lap. “Lillian, forget the damned pear.” “How did it get in there, d’you think?” She poked her finger experimentally into the neck of the bottle. “I don’ see how something so big could fit into a hole that small.” Marcus closed his eyes against a surge of aggravated passion, and his voice cracked as he replied. “They… they put it directly on the tree. The bud grows… inside…” He slitted his eyes open and squeezed them shut again as he saw her finger intruding deeper into the bottle. “Grows…” he forced himself to continue, “until the fruit is ripe.” Lillian seemed rather too impressed by the information. “They do? That is the cleverest, cleverest… a pear in its own little… oh no.” “What?” Marcus asked through clenched teeth. “My finger’s stuck.” Marcus’s eyes flew open. Dumbfounded, he looked down at the sight of Lillian tugging on her imprisoned finger. “I can’t get it out,” she said. “Just pull at it.” “It hurts. It’s throbbing.” “Pull harder.” “I can’t! It’s truly stuck. I need something to make it slippery. Do you have some sort of lubricant nearby?” “No.” “Not anything?” “Much as it may surprise you, we’ve never needed lubricant in the library before now.

In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden" Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and Landed in the middle of those ever-so-slightly green leaves That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and Chalk x’s mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down I’ve seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs. Jones and I swear She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street without It has always puzzled me that people coo over bonsai trees when You can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of A struggle ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets So after untangling the two I took the nets off and watched birds With red beaks fly by all morning at the window I reread your letter About how the castles you flew over made crenellated shadows on The water in the rainbarrel has overflowed and made a small swamp I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them To close I’m sorry there won’t be any salad and I love you

Hagrid added in a whisper to Harry, “but he’ll have a harder time frightenin’ you, an’ we’ve gotta get this done.” So Harry set off into the heart of the forest with Malfoy and Fang. They walked for nearly half an hour, deeper and deeper into the forest, until the path became almost impossible to follow because the trees were so thick. Harry thought the blood seemed to be getting thicker. There were splashes on the roots of a tree, as though the poor creature had been thrashing around in pain close by. Harry could see a clearing ahead, through the tangled branches of an ancient oak. “Look —” he murmured, holding out his arm to stop Malfoy. Something bright white was gleaming on the ground. They inched closer. It was the unicorn all right, and it was dead. Harry had never seen anything so beautiful and sad. Its long, slender legs were stuck out at odd angles where it had fallen and its mane was spread pearly-white on the dark leaves. Harry had taken one step toward it when a slithering sound made him freeze where he stood. A bush on the edge of the clearing quivered. . . . Then, out of the shadows, a hooded figure came crawling across the ground like some stalking beast. Harry, Malfoy, and Fang stood transfixed. The cloaked figure reached the unicorn, lowered its head over the wound in the animal’s side, and began to drink its blood. “AAAAAAAAAAARGH!” Malfoy let out a terrible scream and bolted — so did Fang. The hooded figure raised its head and looked right at Harry — unicorn blood was dribbling down its front. It got to its feet and came swiftly toward Harry — he couldn’t move for fear. Then a pain like he’d never felt before pierced his head; it was as though his scar were on fire. Half blinded, he staggered backward. He heard hooves behind him, galloping, and something jumped clean over Harry, charging at the figure. The pain in Harry’s head was so bad he fell to his knees. It took a minute or two to pass. When he looked up, the figure had gone. A centaur was standing over him, not Ronan or Bane; this one looked younger; he had white-blond hair and a palomino body. “Are you all right?” said the centaur, pulling

What shape is its mother, the trunk of life? Why, it's conical, just like the pear tree that bloody partridge sits in every Christmas time.

Are you ready darling?" The woman extended an olive hand to me, and her smile—it was as warm as I'd always dreamed it. As warm as this summer night. "That boy is asking after you again," the man said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. "Etienne." Butterflies erupted at the name. Unbidden, my feet drifted toward them, my lips lifting in a smile. I couldn't help one last look, however—at Lou, at Reid, at Coco, at Beau. They milled around the pear trees, feeling each trunk, testing the leaves. Laughing at themselves with Terrance and Liana and Maron. If you plant them—if you care for them—they will grow. My smile widened. Madame Sauvage had vanished, leaving them to life anew. Taking my mother's hand, I did too.

THIS RIPENESS Thin roads splice field to field in the early light; under the trees, many pears lie opening to the ground. This ripeness is the landscape I want, a hand on the kitchen table passing from sunlight to shadow, warm wood to cool, and back, behind me the bright jars ranked on their shelves—harvest of rutted lanes, too small for naming, that lead, one to another, through the day.

With a mental sigh, she snapped shut the folder she’d been reading, which was DC Mark Chang’s report on the hijacking of a lorry near the Pear Tree roundabout, in which a batch of computers had gone walkabout. The constable clearly suspected an insider in the computer firm, and Hillary agreed with him. Someone in the firm must have tipped off the hijackers — especially since the routes were always varied, and even the drivers got shuffled around at the last minute without warning. She couldn’t fault the firm’s managing director in his attempts to keep the business’s insurance bills down, and he must be spitting nails at this latest setback

Fair warning, my place isn’t exactly a palace.” Not a palace but a waking dream. A vision I had the night Dominic told me he wanted nothing for a future. A vivid dream of a long driveway lined with Bradford pear trees that bloom white in the spring. A driveway that leads to a house on top of a hill floating in the middle of the mountains. A small house with lots of built-in bookshelves, cozy reading nooks draped with soft plush blankets and throw pillows. And behind it, a garden filled to the brim with every imaginable scent and color. I’d searched for nearly a month before I found something resembling what I dreamt of. The day I closed on it, I painted the front door blood red. And then I stocked the fridge with a rare wine. My last touch was adding my French Bulldog, Beau.

According to Orlov, Voronin was a bum. He knocked pears from trees with his dick. He did what? I'll explain later.

I went back in and grabbed my running clothes, then changed in the bathroom. I opened the door to the bathroom, stopping when I saw Kaidan's toiletry bag on the sink. I was overcome with curiosity about his cologne or aftershave, because I'd never smelled it on anyone else before. Feeling sneaky, I prodded one finger into the bag and peeked. No cologne bottle. Only a razor, shaving cream, toothbrush, toothpaste, and deodorant. I picked up the deodorant, pulled off the lid, and smelled it. Nope, that wasn't it. The sound of Kaidan's deep chuckle close to the doorway made me scream and drop the deodorant into the sink with a clatter. I smacked one hand to my chest and grabbed the edge of the sink with the other. He laughed out loud now. “Okay, that must have looked really bad.” I spoke to his reflection in the mirror, then fumbled to pick up the deodorant. I put the lid on and dropped it in his bag. “But I was just trying to figure out what cologne you wear.” My face was on fire as Kaidan stepped into the small bathroom and leaned against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest. I stepped away. He seemed entertained by my predicament. “I haven't been wearing any cologne.” “Oh.” I cleared my throat. “Well, I didn't see any, so I thought it might be your deodorant, but that's not it either. Maybe it's your laundry detergent or something. Let's just forget about it.” “What is it you smell, exactly?” His voice took on a husky quality, and it felt like he was taking up a lot of room. I couldn't bring myself to look at him. Something strange was going on here. I stepped back, hitting the tub with my heel as I tried to put the scent into words. “I don't know. It's like citrus and the forest or something...leaves and tree sap. I can't explain it.” His eyes bored into mine while he wore that trademark sexy smirk, arms still crossed. “Citrus?” he asked. “Like lemons?” “Oranges mostly. And a little lime, too.” He nodded and flicked his head to the side to get hair out of his eyes. Then his smile disappeared and his badge throbbed. “What you smell are my pheromones, Anna.” A small, nervous laugh burst from my throat. “Oh, okay, then. Well...” I eyed the small space that was available to pass through the door. I made an awkward move toward it, but he shifted his body and I stepped back again. “People can't usually smell pheromones,” he told me. “You must be using your extra senses without realizing it. I've heard of Neph losing control of their senses with certain emotions. Fear, surprise...lust.” I rubbed my hands up and down my upper arms, wanting nothing more than to veer this conversation out of the danger zone. “Yeah, I do have a hard time reining in the scent sometimes,” I babbled. “It even gets away from me while I sleep now and then. I wake up thinking Patti's making cinnamon rolls and it ends up being from someone else's apartment. Then I'm just stuck with cereal. Anyway...” “Would you like to know your own scent?” he asked me. My heart swelled up big in my chest and squeezed small again. This whole scent thing was way too sensual to be discussed in this small space. Any second now my traitorous body would be emitting some of those pheromones and there'd be red in my aura. “Uh, not really,” I said, keeping my eyes averted. “I think I should probably go.” He made no attempt to move out of the doorway. “You smell like pears with freesia undertones.” “Wow, okay.” I cleared my throat, still refusing eye contact. I had to get out of there. “I think I'll just...” I pointed to the door and began to shuffle past him, doing my best not to brush up against him. He finally took a step back and put his hands up by his sides to show that he wouldn't touch me. I broke out of the confined bathroom and took a deep breath.

From Shanghai, Meyer had sent seeds and cuttings of oats, millet, a thin-skinned watermelon, and new types of cotton. The staff of Fairchild's office watched with anticipation each time one of Meyer's shipments were unpacked. There were seeds of wild pears, new persimmons, and leaves of so-called Manchurian spinach that America's top spinach specialist would declare was the best America had ever seen. Meyer had delivered the first samples of asparagus ever to officially enter the United States. In 1908, few people had seen a soybean, a green legume common in central China. Even fewer people could have imagined that within one hundred years, the evolved descendants of soybeans that Meyer shipped back would cover the Midwest of the United States like a rug. Soybeans would be applied to more diverse uses than any other crop in history, as feed for livestock, food for humans (notably vegetarians), and even a renewable fuel called biodiesel. Meyer also hadn't come empty-handed. He had physically brought home a bounty, having taken from China a steamer of the Standard Oil Company that, unlike a passenger ship, allowed him limitless cargo and better onboard conditions for plant material. He arrived with twenty tons, including red blackberries, wild apricots, two large zelkova trees (similar to elms), Chinese holly shrub, twenty-two white-barked pines, eighteen forms of lilac, four viburnum bushes that produced edible red berries, two spirea bushes with little white flowers, a rhododendron bush with pink and purple flowers, an evergreen shrub called a daphne, thirty kinds of bamboo (some of them edible), four types of lilies, and a new strain of grassy lawn sedge.

As he bit into the oily green flesh, Fairchild couldn't have known he was holding in his hands the future crop of the American Southwest. But he had a hunch. It was a black-skinned fruit, a variety of alligator pear, or as the Aztecs called it, "avocado," a derivative of their word for testicle. It grew in pairs, and had an oblong, bulbous shape. The fruit had the consistency of butter and was a little stringy. But unlike the other avocados he had tasted farther north, in Jamaica and Venezuela, this one had remarkable consistency. Every fruit on the tree was the same size and ripened at the same pace, rare qualities for anything that grew in the consistent warmth of the subtropics. In Santiago, where a boat had deposited Fairchild and Lathrop, the avocado had an even greater quality. Fairchild listened intently as someone explained that the fruit could withstand a mild frost as low as twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Such a climatic range suggested a perfect crop for America. From central Mexico, the worldwide home of the first avocados, centuries of settlers had carried the fruit south to Chile. David Fairchild mused about taking it the other way, back north. "A valuable find for California," he wrote. "This is a black-fruited, hardy variety." Lathrop tagged along on the daytime expedition when Fairchild tasted that avocado. He agreed that a fruit so hardy, so versatile, would perfectly answer farmers' pleas for novel but undemanding crops, ones that almost grew themselves, provided the right conditions. Fairchild didn't know the chemical properties of the avocado's fatty flesh, or that a hundred years in the future it would, like quinoa, find esteem, owing to its combination of fat and vitamins. But he could tell that such a curious fruit, unlike any other, must have an equally curious evolutionary history. No earthly mammal could digest a seed as big as the avocado's, and certainly not anything that roamed wild through South America.

In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods---strawberries, pecans, blueberries, and some squashes---that had the durability to survive millennia. Mexico and South America had a respectable collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, and peanuts. But the list is quaint when compared to what the other side of the world was up to. Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands more that endure today. If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second. Edible plants tend to reproduce sexually. A seed produces a plant. The plant produces flowers. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from other plants. This is nature beautifully at work. But it was inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific food they liked. The stroke of genius from early farmers was to realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. Take a small cutting from a mature apple tree, graft it onto mature rootstock, and it'll produce perfectly identical apples. Millenia before humans learned how to clone a sheep, they discovered how to clone plants, and every Granny Smith apple, Bartlett pear, and Cavendish banana you've ever eaten leaves you further indebted to the people who figured that out. Still, even on the same planet, there were two worlds for almost all of human time. People are believed to have dug the first roots of agriculture in the Middle East, in the so-called Fertile Crescent, which had all the qualities of a farmer's dream: warm climate; rich, airy soil; and two flowing rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Around ten thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, humans taught themselves how to grow grains like barley and wheat, and soon after, dates, figs, and pomegranates.

His hands balled into fists. How dare she? How dare she burst into his room and kiss him and dive into a river and invade his dreams and make him go shopping and throw herself headlong into danger and lean back against a pear tree in a dress the exact color of her hair kissed by fading sunlight? How dare she make him forget? Damn it all. Damn her for making him care.

I never thought I’d envy you,” she said. “Never in a million years. You’re so composed, so serious. So cold.” His hands balled into fists. How dare she? How dare she burst into his room and kiss him and dive into a river and invade his dreams and make him go shopping and throw herself headlong into danger and lean back against a pear tree in a dress the exact color of her hair kissed by fading sunlight? How dare she make him forget? Damn it all. Damn her for making him care. “I want to go cold,” she said. “All these feelings—they’re like flames inside me. I’m tired of getting burnt. I don’t want them anymore. I want to put out the fire and just go cold. I never imagined I’d envy you, but today …” Her voice wavered. “Today, I do.

An apple tree will not wish for pears simply because that wish is held for a different kind of tree. But what it can wish for is fruit that is so perfect that it causes the pear tree to wish the same for its fruit.

As your friend, I feel obligated to tell you that Archer would not give a flying fuck, two shits, or a partridge in a pear tree if you started dating Hunter.

What do you want to compare me to, one of those cultivated trees? The hawthorn, the pear, the orange, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs—when their fruit is ripe they get plucked, and that is an insult. Their large branches are bent, their small branches are pruned. Thus do their abilities embitter their lives. That is why they die young, failing to fully live out their Heaven-given lifespans. They batter themselves with the vulgar conventions of the world, as do all the other things of the world. As for me, I’ve been working on being useless for a long time. It almost killed me, but I’ve finally managed it—and it is of great use to me! If I were useful, do you think I could have grown to be so great? Moreover, you and I are both things, objects—how then should we objectify each other? We are members of the same class, namely, things—is either of us in a position to classify and evaluate the other? How could a worthless man with one foot in the grave know what is or isn’t a worthless tree?

Three months after Mara’s overdose, the pear tree in our back yard that has not yielded a single pear for ten years suddenly begins bearing fruit.

in it Edward had spent considerable sums of money refurbishing the gardens of the Tower: at least 13,000 turves were laid and pear trees, rose trees and lily bulbs were all deployed.11

Under a row of pear trees—once an orchard?—I laid me down and idled, an art perfected during my long convalescence. An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.

According to Spinoza, this tree is free. It has its full freedom to develop its inherent abilities. But if it is an apple tree it will not have the ability to bear pears or plums. The same applies to us humans. We can be hindered in our development and our personal growth by political conditions, for instance.

Two starving kids and tree-hugging vegetarians. I’m going to kill Chase.” Phoebe didn’t blame him. Despite her lack of experience in the cattle-drive department, even she could see the potential for trouble. Then a familiar figure standing beside the driver caught her attention, and she waved. Maya grinned and waved back. “It’s Maya,” Phoebe said. Zane turned and followed her gaze. “Just perfect,” he muttered as his ex-stepsister walked toward them. “You’re looking grim, Zane,” Maya said cheerfully when she joined them. “Who died?” She smiled. “Oh, I forgot. You’re just being your usual charming self.” She squeezed his arm. “You’ve missed me, I know.” Zane’s eyes narrowed. “Like foot fungus.” She laughed and turned to Phoebe. “You’re still alive. I see Zane didn’t bore you to death.” “Not even close.” Phoebe hugged her friend. Maya waved forward the bus driver, a pretty woman in her fifties. “Phoebe, this is Elaine Mitchell.” “You’re the one Maya worked for in high school?” Phoebe asked. “I am.” Maya put her arm around Phoebe’s shoulders. “And this is my BFF, Phoebe.” “Welcome to Fool’s Gold,” Elaine said with a smile. Instead of her usual suit and high heels, Maya wore jeans, a long-sleeved shirt and boots. Her blond hair was pulled back in a braid. “You look like a local,” Phoebe said. “Speaking of locals,” Maya began, a note of warning in her voice. “Oh, shit,” Zane said before she could continue. Phoebe looked toward the bus and immediately saw why Zane’s face had gone a little ashen. The two crazy old women who had cornered her at his truck in town had just gotten off the bus. Eddie and Gladys, if she remembered right. The skinny one was wearing stiff, dark blue jeans and a plaid Western shirt with pearly snaps along the front. The plump one, who still looked as if she had asked for one of everything at the cosmetic counter, was wearing jeans, too, and leather chaps with fringe along the sides. They both had cowboy hats perched atop their white curls. Besides her Zane muttered under his breath. She caught a handful of words. Something about being old, broken bones and a reference to hanging Chase from the lightning rod in the middle of a storm.

Paw, paw, paw. On his shirt. “Fucking hell.” He gave in and rubbed that black belly. “And no, I don’t need anything.” The purring got so loud, he had to lean in to the butler. “What did you say?” “I’m happy to oblige whatever you require.” “Yeah. I know. But I’m going to take care of my brother. No one else. Are we clear.” The cat was now rubbing its head into his pec. Then stretching up into the itching. Oh, God, this was awful—especially as the butler’s already droopy face sagged down to what were no doubt knobby knees. “Ah, shit, Fritz—” “Is he ill?” iAm closed his eyes briefly as the female voice registered. Fantastic. Another party heard from. “He’s fine,” iAm said without looking at the Chosen Selena. Leaving the kibitzers in the dust, he went into the pantry with the freeloading cat and . . . Right. How was he going to get the load of post-migraine recovery rations down from the shelves with his arms full of— What was its name? Fine. It was G*dd*mn Cat, then. Looking down into those wide, contented eyes, iAm thinned his lips as he rubbed under its chin. Behind an ear. “Okay, enough with this.” He played with one of the paws. “I gotta put you down now.” Assuming control, he took the cat out of its recline and went to put it down on the— Somehow the thing managed to claw its way into the very fibers of his fleece and hang off the front of him like a tie. “Are you kidding me.” More purring. A blink of those luminous eyes. An expression of self-possession that iAm took to mean this interaction was going to go the cat’s way—and no one else’s. “Mayhap I shall help?” Selena asked softly. iAm bit out a curse and glared at the cat. Then at the Chosen. But short of taking off his pullover? G*dd*mn Cat was sticking with him. “I need some of those Milanos up there?” The Chosen reached up and took a bag from the Pepperidge Farm munchie department. “And he’s going to need some of those tortilla chips.” “Plain or the lime flavor?” “Plain.” iAm gave up the ghost and resumed servicing G*dd*mn—and the cat immediately went into full La-Z-Boy again. “He’s going to want one of the Entenmann’s pound cakes. And we’re going to bring him three ice-cold Cokes, two big Poland Springs, room temperature, and a partridge in a pear tree.” -Boo, iAm, Fritz, & Selena

ALMACANTAR  (ALMACA'NTAR)   n.s.[An Arabick word, written variously by various authours; by D’Herbelot, almocantar; by others, almucantar.]A circle drawn parallel to the horizon. It is generally used in the plural,and means a series of parallel circles drawn through the several degrees of the meridian.   ALMACANTAR’S  (ALMACA'NTAR’S)  STAFF.n.s. An instrument commonly made of pear-tree or box, with an arch of fifteen degrees, used to take observations of the sun, about the time of its rising and setting, in order to find the amplitude, and consequently the variation of the compass.Chambers.

In Santa Fe her whole yard had been crowded with different-sized terra-cotta pots, out of which she grew everything from rosemary and lavender to ornamental pear and plum trees and even peppers, although they were not particularly popular with the bees. In Colorado she'd created a fertile oasis out of old gas cans and cut-off oil drums. Her neighbors had been skeptical to begin with but once her creepers grew up and her flowers draped down and her shrubs fluffed out, the junkyard ugly duckling was transformed into the proverbial backyard swan.

Sorrel always thought herself happy in the little village by the sea. She was content among her flowers and specimen trees, the extraordinary roses and lilacs, sweet peas and hydrangeas that bloomed- somehow simultaneously and for months beyond reason- in the Nursery. She found great pleasure in picking the pears, cherries, and apples for Nettie's tarts, the tender young peas and beans, the lettuce so green it glowed, and the nasturtiums and violas that her sister used in her salads. She was grateful for Patience's remedies on the rare occasion when she felt ill. But Sorrel's hands were happiest deep in the soil and curled around the stems of the flowers she grew and arranged.

There were two sons of Zeus, three sons of Ares, two sons of Hermes and one son each of Dionysus, Helios, Poseidon, Hephaestus and a partridge in a pear tree.

The rolling hills we traveled through were lined with rows of crisscrossed crops- apple and pear trees, vines of grapes, and maize- creating bafflingly precise geometries. In the forested areas, the branches on the trees drooped lugubriously like the long sleeves of Druid priests. Jonathan pointed to the curved roads that cut through the hillsides and valleys. "Forged by Romans, Mina!" he said. "So many civilizations have come and gone on this land- Celts, Romans, Normans, Mongols, French. Who knows how many more?

The Way the Cards Fall " Why did you stay away so long? I’ve buried another husband, since I last saw you holding to the horizon. I hear where you now live it snows year-round. The pear & apple trees have even missed you– dead branches scattered about like war. Come closer, my eyes have grown night-dim. Across the field white boxes of honeybees silent as dirt, silent as your missent postcards. Evening sunlight’s faded my hair, the old stable’s slouched to the ground. I dug a hole for that calico, Cyclops, two years ago. Now milkweed & blackberries are keepers of the cornfield. That’s how the cards fall; & Anna, that beautiful girl you once loved enough to die over & over again for, now lives in New Orleans on both sides of Bourbon Street.

The fact that there were more adults than children at her party didn't seem to faze Dixie. "That child is like a dandelion," Lettie said. "She could grow through concrete." Dixie's birthday party had a combination Mardi Gras/funeral wake feel to it. Mr. Bennett and Digger looped and twirled pink crepe paper streamers all around the white graveside tent until it looked like a candy-cane castle. Leo Stinson scrubbed one of his ponies and gave pony rides. Red McHenry, the florist's son, made a unicorn's horn out of flower foam wrapped with gold foil, and strapped it to the horse's head. "Had no idea that horse was white," Leo said, as they stood back and admired their work. Angela, wearing an old, satin, off-the-shoulder hoop gown she'd found in the attic, greeted each guest with strings of beads, while Dixie, wearing peach-colored fairy wings, passed out velvet jester hats. Charlotte, who never quite grasped the concept of eating while sitting on the ground, had her driver bring a rocking chair from the front porch. Mr. Nalls set the chair beside Eli's statue where Charlotte barked orders like a general. "Don't put the food table under the oak tree!" she commanded, waving her arm. "We'll have acorns in the potato salad!" Lettie kept the glasses full and between KyAnn Merriweather and Dot Wyatt there was enough food to have fed Eli's entire regiment. Potato salad, coleslaw, deviled eggs, bread and butter pickles, green beans, fried corn, spiced pears, apple dumplings, and one of every animal species, pork barbecue, fried chicken, beef ribs, and cold country ham as far as the eye could see.

The Garden I You are clear O rose, cut in rock, hard as the descent of hail. I could scrape the colour from the petals like spilt dye from a rock. If I could break you I could break a tree. If I could stir I could break a tree— I could break you. II O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it to tatters. Fruit cannot drop through this thick air— fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes. Cut the heat— plough through it, turning it on either side of your path.

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Because you’ve managed to hide the existence of a significant other from the blogs. I don’t care if you’re involved with a man, a woman, or a sapient pear tree. You ought to go into international espionage. I never even heard a rumor.

The walnut tree told me when Emeline Margulies turned eighteen. Law-wise in Pennsylvania, a girl burns her ships at eighteen. Her daddy was dead and she was alone, so I bound her with spells, talk of blue spruce situated off the front porch, small-mouth bass jumping bugs at the lake, and how sunshine bounces from the water to the orchard and turns pear blossoms gold. She bought every word and wiggled close. I took her wrist and got my hand on her neck and I couldn’t think of nothing save the bones inside her.

There are no signs of religion at all; no priest to hear my sins, no God to push open the pearly gates, nor a devil to welcome me with a pitchfork. All of this seems so meaningless.

Man and woman could enjoy everything in God’s entire creation, with the exception of one thing, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it” (Gen. 2:17). That one tree speaks to us of choice; and we know that love cannot be real unless it can be chosen or refused. Notice this is a tree of the “knowledge of good and evil,” not a pear tree or an apple tree or a common fruit tree. God’s perfect plan was to make an incomplete man-woman whose perfect love, sufficiency, and completion was found only in his and her God. It’s accurately been said that there’s a God-shaped hole in all of us, and until that void is filled with God alone, we remain incomplete and unfulfilled.

Breakfast in the shed of the pear groves  was an experience, made by Mizrahi. I remember his unique and diverse Shakshuka. I remember the side dishes and refreshing coffee. Nothing resembled that stolen sandwich, I used to eat in Kinneret under the shade of the banana trees. No one here was in a rush and no one urged you to finish. There was no stressful work atmosphere. I could not help but make the comparison of the working conditions here, to my  father's in the banana plantations of Kinneret.

Mantova" The first thing I saw in the morning Was a huge golden bee ploughing His burly right shoulder into the belly Of a sleek yellow pear Low on a bough. Before he could find that sudden black honey That squirms around in there Inside the seed, the tree could not bear any more. The pear fell to the ground, With the bee still half alive Inside its body. He would have died had I not knelt down And sliced the pear gently A little more open. The bee shuddered, and returned. Maybe I should have left him a lone there Drowning in his own delight. The best days are the first To flee.

She couldn't make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom-- a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.

Like the pear tree, our whole body is sonified. Hearing is not only an aural sensation. In my ear canals bundles floats enclosed in a few drops of ocean water. Rooted in a cell surface, each bundle turns flickers of high and low pressure into nerve signals. The bundles translate fibrillating fluid into electric charge, thence to the brain. Cranium is a dish and a drum, mouth is a wet horn, throat and spine are passageways from the lower body. Torso is pumpkin, half seedy gut, half hollow lung gourd…hearing is modulated by tongue taste, emotion, foot soles, hairs on a skin. What we perceive is the conclusion of our body conversing within a purring, stridulating world.

There's a subdivision near us called Mill Run. By a stroke of good luck, the planners decided to line the streets with silver maples instead of those trees from the pit of Gehenna known as Bradford pears. (Bradford pears, by the way, are an abomination. I'm not using that word flippantly. They were engineered in the 1960s and because they cross-pollinate with every other kind of pear tree, their prolific offspring is destroying forests faster than kudzu. I think of them as a tree version of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. They're preferred by developers because they're cheap, they grow fast, and they produce malodorous but pretty white flowers in the spring, which happens to be when most home sales happen. But after the developers leave, the trees require regular pruning, a gust of wind can split them in half, and they're producing an inhospitable forest of non-native offspring that's riddled with thorns. Left unchecked, they'll soon overtake all the lovely oaks, maples, sycamores, and ashes that are native to our part of the world. Take my word for it: they're awful. If you have one in your yard, for goodness sake, cut it down and spend $25 on a maple at Lowe’s.

Garden season deepened. The lantern flies winked and blinked. Poppies flaunted their scarlet robes. Ants feasted in the peonies, and protected them from invaders. The pear tree blossomed. Lavender sensed her mother's presence, just past the first layer of fragrant air. In the parlor, the harp stood, silent, as before. But its silence didn't grieve Lavender. Its magic had wintered her through part of the journey that brought her to where she was now.

On the fifth date of Shagmas my true love gave to me, One gay man dancing, One date of drinking, One fireman skating, One vegan weeping And a no-show outside the Pear Tree!

Fruits were my candy as a little girl growing up in Barbados. I was surrounded by a variety of fruit trees: Tamarind, cherry, mango, dunks, papaya, guava, pear, sugar apple, golden apple, and gooseberry trees.

She’d kissed a lot of boys since then. Hell, she’d kissed a lot of boys this month. But still, nothing ever quite matched that first stolen kiss behind the pear tree.

Kate sighed. No matter how much distance she put between herself and Matt, the roots of that pear tree would always be tugging at her soul, pulling her back to him.

When American experts began making “helpful” suggestions about how the French could “increase productivity and profits,” the average Frenchman would shrug, as if to say: “These notions of yours are all very fascinating, no doubt, but we have a nice little business here just as it is. Everybody makes a decent living. Nobody has ulcers. I have time to work on my monograph about Balzac, and my foreman enjoys his espaliered pear trees. I think, as a matter of fact, we do not wish to make these changes that you suggest.

A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit,” Lincoln once explained to an abolitionist. “Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

Spring 1930 The wind whipped the little white flowers from the pear tree outside Eliza's window overlooking the garden. The flowers would not bloom again this spring. The racket those branches made was too much to sleep through, so Eliza slipped her wrap around her silken chemise and wandered over toward the window. The garden outside was dark. The garden, once so full of hope and promise, would look different in the morning, after the storm finished ravaging what was left of the February blooms. But she had already, of course, fallen in love with a different season after her mother and grandmother died in the summer. She had already adopted February over June. So she would simply have to do that again: to tell her heart to see the beauty in March or April or May. The problem, of course, occurred when the wind roared and the rains flooded everything. Nothing about this was the way she'd planned. There was nothing wrong with Robert. There was just nothing right about him either. But why would she pine for the man who'd left her behind? Why, in such uncertain times, should she cease to keep living... so preoccupied by a dream? Maybe she could find a new dream. And she always had her love for painting, so that was something, at least. When the nectar fell from the trees, she would paint it by memory.

They drove up Third Avenue so that they might see the famous Stuyvesant pear tree on the corner of Thirteenth Street. Again for the two hundredth time its ancient boughs were loaded with blossoms. How strange it was that it could go on renewing itself in exquisite youth, when the hands that had planted it had so long ago fallen to dust!

There was a clearing in the forest, a wide sward of moonlit grass, and the white rays shone full upon the tree trunks on the opposite side. These trees were beeches, whose trunks are always more beautiful in a pearly light, and among the beeches there was the smallest movement and a silvery clink. Before the clink there were just the beeches, but immediately afterward there was a knight in full armour, standing still and silent and unearthly, among the majestic trunks. He was mounted on an enormous white horse that stood as rapt as its master, and he carried in his right hand, with its butt resting on the stirrup, a high, smooth jousting lance, which stood up among the tree stumps, higher and higher, till it was outlined against the velvet sky. All was moon-lit, all silver, too beautiful to describe.

It was now, I realized almost with a shock, October; perhaps the most beautiful month of the year in Rome. The trees had changed into a hundred shades of red and gold. Sometimes an unearthly pearly light washed the city, sharp and clear like a spring morning on the Acropolis, and in the evening that curious pinkish flush in the streets, which lasts only from dusk to darkness, seemed to be accentuated. Masses of splendid fat grapes, black and white, filled the street stalls. They reminded me that Bacchic revels made respectable by church processions—a collaboration that would not have surprised Gregory the Great—were taking place in the wine towns of the Castelli Romani, where the grape harvest had now been gathered. Some pungent whiff of this Virgilian moment seemed to enter Rome in the morning with those odd-looking wine carts and their rows of little barrels, the driver sitting up beneath a huge ribbed umbrella, in shape like the shell of some shabby and discredited Aphrodite. They trundled into Trastevere and replenished the tavern cellars with more than usual jollity and it was often in my mind to go out to Frascati and look up my friends of the wine vaults who were, I supposed, now knee deep in the new vintage: but I never did so.

Peace is white sun reflections on summer pear trees, and ocean mist droplets defying gravity by air currents. Peace is caffeinated goodbye-kissing and velvet smiles laced with credence. Trumpet horns sound off the coming of Blue Jays, Swallows and Chickadee’s. And there is no sadness echoing within or without. There is a taste of God in every grass blade and car horn raging in the city. The stop lights are all green, and there are children playing in the fountains. A dog laps my hand, and finally—I remembered what it’s all about.

I look at the discarded cans and cigarette butts that litter the beautiful garden, the rotting fruit from Anna’s beloved pear tree. I wonder what Helen’s parents would think of their children now.

The Moon stranded in pear-tree branches like golden pirogue on a Christmas tree, on lips of raspberry the legends fall silent of the hearts bloodied by a midnight's decree —

Far more beautiful than their real-life counterparts, my dream trees were always full of pearly plums that transformed into glittery cocoons, sleeping caterpillars, which I thought were beautiful in a strange and slightly repugnant way.

wood when he saw it. He was seeing it now, and didn’t quite believe it. An archmage, by dint of great effort and much expenditure of time, might eventually obtain a small staff made from the timber of the sapient pear tree. It grew only on the sites of ancient magic. There were probably no more than two such staffs in all the cities of the Circle Sea. A large chest of it . . . Rincewind tried to work it out, and decided that even if the box were crammed with star opals and sticks of auricholatum

An old Hasidic rabbi asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and day begun, for daybreak is the time for certain holy prayers. “Is it,” proposed one student, “when you can see an animal in the distance and tell whether it is a sheep or a dog?” “No,” answered the rabbi. “Is it when you can clearly see the lines on your own palm?” “Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell if it is a fig or a pear tree?” “No,” answered the rabbi each time. “Then what is it?” the pupils demanded. “It is when you can look on the face of any man or woman and see that they are your sister or brother. Until then it is still night.

Baby Rollo had finally succeeded in diving from the pear tree straight into the center of an oversized sliced apple and wild plum crumble. He sat smiling and eating his way out, a mass of sweet acorn crumbs and sticky fruit.

The old covenant which God had made with Israel depended upon man. The Ten Commandments said, “Don’t, don’t, don’t.” It depended upon the weak arm of the flesh, and as a result, it failed. This was not because there was anything wrong with the Ten Commandments or with the Law that God gave. The problem was with man. The same thing occurred in the Garden of Eden. Many people think that there was something wrong with the forbidden fruit or that the tree was something unusual. I think it was good fruit and just like any other. The problem was not the fruit on the tree but the pear (pair) on the ground! This New Covenant depends upon the power of the throne of God; it depends upon the Lord Jesus Christ.

In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.

He always planted at a new moon and picked when the moon was full. He had a lunar chart in his greenhouse, each day marked in a dozen different inks; brown for potatoes, yellow for parsnips, orange for carrots. Watering too was done to an astrological schedule, as was the pruning and positioning of trees. And the garden thrived on this eccentric treatment, growing strong, luxuriant rows of cabbages and turnips, carrots which were sweet and succulent and mysteriously free of slugs, trees whose branches fairly touched the ground under the weight of apples, pears, plums, cherries. Brightly colored Oriental-looking signs taped to tree branches supposedly kept the birds from eating the fruit. Astrological symbols- painstakingly constructed from pieces of broken pottery and colored glass set into the gravel path- lined the garden beds.

Hausen himself, whose chief concern, second only to his reverence for titles, was a passionate attention to the amenities offered by each night’s billets, was equally annoyed. On August 27, his first night in France, no château was available for himself and the Crown Prince of Saxony who accompanied him. They had to sleep in the house of a sous-préfet which had been left in complete disorder; “even the beds had not been made!” The following night was worse: he had to endure quarters in the house of a M. Chopin, a peasant! The dinner was meager, the lodgings “not spacious,” and the staff had to accommodate itself in the nearby rectory whose curé had gone to war. His old mother, who looked like a witch, hung around and “wished us all at the devil.” Red streaks in the sky showed that Rocroi, through which his troops had just passed, was in flames. Happily the following night was spent in the beautifully furnished home of a wealthy French industrialist who was “absent.” Here the only discomfort suffered by Hausen was the sight of a wall covered by espaliered pear trees heavy with fruit that was “unfortunately not completely ripe.” However, he enjoyed a delightful reunion with Count Munster, Major Count Kilmansegg, Prince Schoenburg-Waldenburg of the Hussars, and Prince Max, Duke of Saxe, acting as Catholic chaplain, to whom Hausen was able to convey the gratifying news that he had just received by telephone the best wishes for success of the Third Army from his sister, the Princess Mathilda.

Twelve bagpipes wailing, Eleven mermaids dancing.   Ten piskies chanting. Nine boats a fishing. Eight kilts in tartan, Seven shirts for rugby, Six pies of pilchards, Five…rum and shrubs, Four saffron buns, Three hevva cakes, Two Newlyn crabs and a pasty in a pear tree.

He is a wanderer," said the stranger. "He travels from village to village. He writes his poems on the road and he reads them to whomever he meets. He touches us here." The stranger pointed to his heart. "He has a mysterious and wonderful power. Tomorrow we will see that something has occurred. It will be because of him." . . . In the night a pear tree had flowered, sprouting white and pink blossoms. "It is nothing that would not have happened anyway," said Baz. "But maybe no one would have noticed," said Tadis. "The Poet has opened their eyes. He has made them see what is there. That is his power.

What a great opportunity to rediscover this ancient use of the "Twelve Days of Christmas"! We know about the "partridge in a pear tree;' but the deeper spiritual meaning of these days is lost to most people. To illustrate, the third day represents the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. Rather than "five golden rings;' the traditional reference is to the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Seven symbolizes the gifts of the Holy Spirit in Romans 12; eight represents the Beatitudes of Matthew 5; ten-can you guess?-stands for the Ten Commandments.

since dawn and was utterly exhausted with efforts to make the squash court a place in which people could not only sleep, but keep their personal effects. The cooking had proved extremely difficult, as the kitchen utensils from Mill Farm had been moved to Pear Tree Cottage, and the Babies’ Hotel equipment – brought down in a Cazalet lorry – had lost its way and did not turn up until nine in the evening. They had to make the meal at Pear Tree Cottage and Villy took it down with them in a car. This meant cooking under the almost offensively patronising eye of Emily, whose view of ladies and their children was, of course, that they couldn’t boil an egg to save their lives; she was also unwilling to tell them where anything was on the twofold grounds that she didn’t know whether she was on her head or her heels with all the upset, and didn’t want them using her things anyway. Louise had to admit that Nora was wonderfully tactful and apparently insensitive to slights. They made two huge shepherd’s pies and Louise a batch of real Bath buns because she had just learned how to do them and was particularly good at it. The supper had been most gratefully received and Matron had called them two little bricks. Babies could be heard crying as they reached the house. Nora said that they

And she seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life.

In the garden there were small hard pears that you could lift from a tree, and tulips and peonies and hot pink azaleas that vexed me with their greedy bloom.

The sun had begun to wink behind the trees, but pockets of other light burst all around. Lanterns hung from tree branches; there was a firepit in the center of the lawn; and in the pond, the silky water shimmered with little full moons floating on the surface. No, not moons--- orbs. Such simple sources of light, but Rose was struck by how they looked like they'd dipped down from the sky, unwilling to miss the festivities. It was a lush, clandestine beauty, mixed with the unsupervised cacophony of the people disrupting it. The word "decadence" came to mind. Rose loved that in the middle of it all Hart seemed oblivious to it, stuck in tour-guide mode. "This is my favorite tree on the property," he said. Rose also loved that he had a favorite tree. Its curlicue branches plumed outward like long hair in water, and in certain spots, its leaves drooped and swept over the ground. "It's a one-hundred-year-old weeping hemlock," Hart said. "One of the oldest hemlocks this side of the Western Hemisphere, and the estate's namesake." They walked beneath the canopy, where string lights and pearly garlands hung like so many gaudy necklaces on a dowager duchess. Rose had never paid much attention to trees, but even she couldn't deny this one's majesty.

VENUS Azazel as the Morning and Evening Star, the Venusian knowledge of the beautification, appearance and alluring charms of seduction are instructed by him. Venus rules the constellations of Libra the Scales and Bull of Taurus. Venus represents a force for harmony, fertility and lust, love and unity. Venus inspires luck and fortune, affection and inspiring artistic surroundings. Copper and bronze are of Venus, gemstones include Emerald, Rose Quartz, Malachite, Jade and trees such as Apple, Lemon, Orange, Pears, etc. Incenses include Red Sandalwood, Spearmint, Valerian, Cardamom, etc. Aprodite, Ishtar of Arbela, Astarte, Ashtaroth (Canaanite) Egyptian Bast, Hathor, Beelzebub (Testament of Solomon, Evening Star), Lucifer (Roman and modern Fallen Angel), Astaroth, Paimon, etc.

But thoughts don't work like that--you don't pick them like pears from a tree, they just fall on your head

And the thought of her garden---ballast and bread, those blooms and vines and spinney sprigs. Herbs that comforted, cured. Growing conditions had been ideal that summer. Resplendent. Delphinium spires soared their prettiest periwinkle blue; roses clambered over the arbor, luxuriant ivy slumped languidly like legions of lounging ladies. Myrtle gleamed so waxen Lavender almost saw a miniature of her face reflected back in its leaves. Ferns forested. Hollyhocks hollered their joy. Aromatic too, pears from her mother's tree. Even the moss spread ardent, brashly ambitious. The borage grew boisterous. And yarrow, always yarrow. And purple lavender, her namesake. Though some flower dictionaries ascribed a wary, ambiguous meaning to lavender, her mother long ago had asserted the contrary, that lavender equated calmness, serenity.

I have been spending some portion of the morning thinking about the garden as the living physical expression of the idea of the sacred, and maybe as close as we can get to that on earth. This is an ancient perspective, and in many religions, but is perhaps not an idea for these times, and I have been cautiously trying to figure out just what it is that I believe. It's a complex thought with many side roads, and I have lost my way. But something of that travelling is in my head when I look up this evening and see the light silvering the eastern side of the weeping pear tree.

They have the strength of the stranger,” Skeffington said. “They’ve never taken any pears because they’ve never been close to the pear tree.

The Twelve Days of Christmas.’ The guy gives his true love something on every day, starting with a partridge in a pear tree on the first day.

But the trees would remain with him and he would always mourn them. He had laboured for them all of his life. They would most likely die, although a few might remain, maybe the Black Twigs, like a tribe of vagabonds. He had seen it before; deserted properties where the house had been gone for decades, but the trees remained, obstinate apple, pear and lemon trees that would not yield.