Reminders of a Sun-blushed Pear
By Laura Tóth
After the summer’s soaring sun, a destroyer this year, had left the pears freckled and sun-blushed, I now twist and tear them from the branches at the edge of October under low skies sooty like a child’s arm-smudged drawing in graphite.
At home, I leave them in partial, sullen shadows, setting them down by the one corner of the kitchen that light from the slanted window cannot make radiant.
Every day I eat pears in twos—each a whisper-like yellow delight specked brown like a quail egg, with sweetness and grit sinking into my teeth while syrupy liquid always narrowly misses trickling down my chin and leaving a glinting trail.
And with every bite of every pear, I think of my always long-gone great-grandmother whose orchard pears my mother still tells tales about, tongue heavy with longing: all the memories warping sweet with dulcet fruit bejewelling trees, with the pears cocooned inside sheer-thin dough that stretched across the rose wood table, with the golden pastry shell being covered in lakes of custard; them together on the precipice of a sugar rush.
Soon the bare beginnings of winter will sweep the land. The pear tree will be filmed in thin frost at best, or wearing a thick coat of snow at worse. The nest of Blackbirds, a home of twigs meticulously constructed and leftover from before the night migrations began, will be laden with a spoonful of snow at the center and its particles will flicker a coral-colored glint during the sunrise.
And I will lend it a tender gaze, a touch, or a song, and pray that it erupts into blossoms enough to cover the whole meadow threefold.
You have only to stare at an object long enough, and sentiment will come lapping at your bones until every sweep enfolds you. Memory veiled yellow—yellow as this pear I’m holding mid-air with two half moons embedded in the flesh, as the tinny china was in my great-grandmother’s kitchen. Yellow as searching for each other across time, as loving both in presence and in absence.
Bio: I’m a 26-year-old emerging poet and writer writing in my second language—my penchant for writing stems from my love for literature, and though submitting my work has been a dream of mine for many years, it’s only now that I’ve accepted the vulnerability that comes with sharing my pieces with a wider audience.
Author’s Notes: My inspiration behind this particular piece was nostalgia and longing, as well as the ephemera of the seasons, coupled with the sentimental meanings that I like to assign to the mundane—in a world so fast-moving, I find it a grounding practice to actively look for meaning in the sensitive happenings of our daily lives. I hope that this story will manage to evoke long-forgotten memories within the readers.
