Green Grapes

[AlroyFarms]

When I was young, at that age still good and innocent, my abuela would take me to a local restaurant. Grandpa would slurp bowls of steaming pozole topped with dried oregano and fresh diced onions, white and crisp.

The entrance to this Mexican eatery was tucked back in an alley lined with flagstone, not even visible from the street. The way was completely shaded with grapevines, growing and growing, overhead and wall-to-wall. To a kid, it was an enchanted secret grove—nothing like anything I’ve ever seen in the rest of the city. How could a part of the city be secret and hidden and beautiful?

Even better, sour grapes!

I used to nab bits of them on the way in and way out, little gems. I loved them so sour and pre-ripe. Green and shimmering, slightly powdery, and so tightly bound they’d just burst at the slightest provocation.

This beat any candy abuela could ever buy me.

But grandma didn’t like my habit one bit. She’d hiss and slap my hand reaching out for the newly budding grapes every time.

You’ll get poisoned, she’d say. You’ll get a seed and it’ll grow right inside you until you pop too.

I risked it.

Then back at grandma and grandpa’s house, we had cherries, pears, apricots, small green sour apples. Get yourself some green and yellow little cherries, just barely turning red. Sour crabapples with a dash of salt. It’s good. And the seeds growing inside my belly be damned!

Green sour apricots were really my favorite. The best.

Abuela was OCD. A freak of tidiness. She couldn't wait to clean, and I couldn't wait for fruit to ripen. Have you ever seen someone use an electric vacuum to suck up cottonwood tufts still in the air, floating through the yard?

The apricot tree was on the lawn of the front yard, that silky green American Dream lawn. You could just lie across from the birdbath and suck on sour apricots in the shade, and take a cool drink from the garden hose. Abuela demanded for grandpa to cut it down year after year.

That was the end. The pear tree dried up. The cherry tree got overran by ants, and then birds.

I can still drive down to that part of city and look into the alley. There’s no shade, no overhanging trellises, all repaved proper. All secrets and enchantments dispelled.

It’s amazing what a memory I re-collected from my produce bag today, 3 tiny green grapes rolling around in my colander. Bursting and sour! They are typically very hard for me to find, almost never happens.

I want an apricot tree. I want an apricot tree. I want somewhere to plant, and I think I could be happy with just that.

[Encia22]

Your nostalgic tale brought back many memories of when I did the same, more or less. I love sour and bitter, so the unripen fruit and budding olives directly from the trees were my daily treat. At one point we had a crab apple tree, some of its fruit was almost inedible, but I still preferred them uncooked over sweeter varieties. 

Unfortunately, we didn’t have an apricot tree, but my mother taught me to break open the apricot kernel to get to the seed … oh so bitter, but irresistible once you got used to them.

[ArMaP]

Although I don't like unripe fruit (and I'm not even a great fruit fan), your description of those times and situations reminded me of the vacations I used to spend with my grandparents.

My father's side of the family is from the south of Portugal, from the region of Alentejo, and my grandfather was very good with plants (he was very good at grafting (I think that's the right word), so we had a quince tree that gave quinces and pears and a pear tree with tree different pear varieties), so we had pears, quinces, plums, apricots, olives, figs and some 6 different varieties of grape, so although the area was not big (some 400 square metres) we had lots of fruit and vegetables at our disposal.

As we (my elder sister and myself) used to spend the Summer vacations there (and return with a few kilos of extra weight, to which eating bread with margarine and sugar was a big help ), part of the ground was usually free for us to make tents with old rags and some canes.

Great times.

Thanks for this opportunity to remember this.

[quintessentone]

OP, your story of eating unripe fruit brings back childhood memories when living in a large city, I would go through two laneways behind houses as a shortcut to the corner store which was two blocks away. Well our neighbourhood had many immigrants who grew their own food in their backyards, a long time ago.

This one house's backyard had a very large weather-worn wooden fence where just beyond my reach was a pear tree but I could not resist wanting an unripe pear.

So I would take a running jump and I usually managed to pull off an unripe pear from the closer overhanging branches, rip off a bit of branch with a pear, and start eating it. The owner of the property was none the wiser.

It was only until the pears were at a more ripened state that the owner started noticing missing pears on the back of the tree because I wasn't the only one taking his pears off that tree.

At that time the pears were scarce on the laneway-side, so I had to try to climb or rather hang on the tall wooden fence and pull myself up to see if I could see any pears that could be plucked, but the owner was waiting and chase me and all the other kids away, but only temporarily, until next year.

I think I ate one unripened pear when my mother bought them, just to see what they tasted like; it was okay but I preferred ripened pears at home. Now that I think about it, taking my neighbor's unripened pears may have been about 'because I can' or the thrill of stealing as a kid. I don't know, that's for a child psychiatrist to figure out, but those unripened pears just seemed to be just a little sweeter, when they really were not as they were extremely hard.