sf wrote:
>
> Fresh figs are awfully darned good. Figs and apricots - two things I
> look forward to eating fresh.

Reminds me that as a teenager I lived next to
an abandoned prune orchard. The prunes were
grafted onto plum bases, and in many cases
the plum part had taken over. Most of the
trees didn't have any prunes.

Of course, some of you are even now preparing
to blast me for making this distinction
between prunes and plums. Prunes are indeed
a type of dried plum, but the plums used to
make prunes are a special type of plum much
different from regular plums.

Prune-plums have a purple skin and are shaped
sort of like a flattened football. The flesh
is orange and somewhat firmer than regular plums.
They taste quite good fresh.

But I like the plums the best. The plums were
all small, about the size of cherries. Some
were red and some were yellow. The trees were
enormously different in flavor. Some were so
bitter as to be completely inedible. Remember,
they were selected as base stock and not ever
expected to produce round plums.

Because I roamed the whole area and knew every
tree, I knew where the good ones were. There
was a large yellow plum tree which was a prodigious
producer of sweet plums with a nice texture.

But the best came from a small red plum tree
which produced very sweet fruit. The most
distinguishing feature of this tree was the
delicacy of the flesh of its fruit. When you
picked one that was perfectly ripe, its flesh
was almost like water, it was so delicate.
The birds knew about this tree before I did.
When in fruit, this tree always had a lot of
birds in it.

I suppose I'll never have fruit like that again.