We had gone for a walk around my neighborhood. A suggestion You made timidly over the phone before driving over. I was in the throes of a terrible depressive episode that I hadn’t been able to shake since I had moved to town.
I had moved mid-pandemic. I didn’t have a job. My roommate, a friend of Yours, was a worse alcoholic than could’ve been predicted. I had only just started dating again, and by dating, I mean I was semi-regularly having sex with a dancer in a loft downtown, and I didn’t understand why he wasn’t obsessed with me. It was all too much, especially for You. We had been friends for decades. You weren’t a stranger to my depression, but when sobs cross over phone lines and state lines, they have less weight. A new reality came with me calling to talk about how I woke up crying, again. How I can’t believe I uprooted what I had grown in Denver. How I felt I’d never make money again. How I hadn’t left bed that day. That I no longer had any sense of what I was working towards.
I was, and am, impossible to console. Although I am easily distracted, so that spring afternoon we walked. Frequently stopping to learn the names of all the newly bloomed. Indian Hawthorns, Golden Trumpet Tree, Pink Trumpet Tree, Orchid Tree.
Then we came across a tree with dark green oval leaves and bright orange fruit. You pulled the fruit from the tree and extended Your large, open hand to me.
“You can eat these.”
I took one.
“They have seeds.”
You popped Yours in your mouth whole and then spit out the seed. Pinched between Your index and thumb, You showed me the smooth wooden marble-like thing.
I bit the orange pear-shaped thing you handed me in half. My teeth easily pierced the fuzzy soft skin through the delicate flesh until I hit the seed. Mine had two nestled together. I picked them out and rolled them around in my palm, finishing the fruit. Delicate like white tea with a subtle tartness reminiscent of an apricot.
“What is this?”
“They’re loquats.”
I kept picking from each tree we passed. The soft brown branches so easy to pull from. When we get to Poinsettia Park You hand me your fistful of seeds. Slick with spit, they rolled easily around my palm.
“Do you think I can sprout them?” I ask.
“I’m sure you could. I figured you could add them to your altar.” You tell me.
At home that afternoon, I lay them across my windowsill in the pink light reflecting off the bougainvilleas that climbed my neighbor’s building between our driveways.
After that, I clocked them everywhere. There were even two in Your yard. One small straggly tree that hung over into the neighbor’s property, and a huge one that took over the yard on Your side of the bungalows. The big one had brighter orange fruits. Your neighbor, an older woman with two white dogs who barked at everyone, told me one day it was because she watered it regularly. An obsession formed. I had started trying to take note of things I had here that I had nowhere else. These delicate fruits grew only in people’s yards or randomly along the street. The fruit bruised too easily to become the mass-produced grocery store star Charles P. Taft wanted them to be. I may never have discovered them had I not lived here.
That first spring, I made jam and sent it as Mother’s Day gifts to family and friends in Jersey and Colorado. I picked as many as I could when I was at Your place. I ate them by the fistful on the worn table in Your alley with coffee. I rallied other friends to come walk and pick until my glass Pyrex bowls were full. I started talking to my neighbors. I even got into a small fight with a man who tried to accuse me and a friend of stealing. Two small children came to my defense, claiming that the squirrels ate them, so why shouldn’t I be able to take them?
The next spring, they came as a bright orange marker that I had made it another year. I watched Your tree ripen and bought fruit inside excitedly to make sure you knew the season had returned. Having learned that they don’t have a high enough pH to be canned this time around, I baked them into frangipane tarts and upside-down cakes. I put them in salads. I filled the cavities where I plucked their seeds from with soft sheep’s cheeses and pudgy buffalo cheeses.
This spring, I had friends who remembered my obsession from the year before. People bought me grocery bags of branches clipped from their yards. I was given numbers for people who had trees but no use for the fruit. Those few weeks stretching between April and May, I didn’t go anywhere without some form of loquat to share.
By my third spring, cracks had started to splinter our friendship. The weight of our separate struggles sat uncomfortably between our shifting dynamics. Our proximity had created a new need for space. My life had filled up with work, and the ever-present need to be “productive”. You had new love, but no work. We hung out mainly in groups. I was going over less and less. You never updated me on the loquat tree in Your yard. I worried that if our friendship wavered, there was no way my new ones could last.
Time continued to take its toll. Patterns became harder and harder to ignore. We slipped, and the seasons changed. Getting out of the city to look for all the beautiful things that kept us in California was replaced with work calls, new lovers, and a communication breakdown, neither of us seemed to have the correct tools for.
My fourth spring brings a whole new understanding of the loquat tree. I noticed its buds and white flowers in December. It’s tiny green fruits in March. It’s a new constant in my life here. Along with the poppies, the grass, and the indian hawthorn bushes. Spring still shows up, even now, as we don’t.
