I haven’t had a good pear in years. I remember one I had a long time ago—biting into it full of juice, juice filling my mouth, sweet and full of flavor—something worth savoring, something I’ve been looking to repeat. Each time I bite into a pear, I want that flavor again, but I’m disappointed: too dry, too mealy, too tough. I’ve been searching for just the right pear maybe a decade or more. There’s something beautiful about pears. Artists love to render them on the limb or in a bowl mixed with other fruits or simply by themselves—the light-green Bartlett or golden-brown Bosc. Something about a pear that’s so desirable: shaped like the uterus inverted as though life flows from it. Not as glamorous as dragon fruit or passion fruit, not wild or tropical like Jamaica’s rose apple or guinep or sour sap—willing to linger in obscurity, always in the background, an afterthought, seldom a pie. Perhaps it was the forbidden fruit once. I haven’t had a good pear in so long. The pear does not shout; it waits for you to desire it, to come to it and taste, and if fortune holds for you just the right pear at just the right time—you will not forget it. Years from now, you’ll remember the pear, the perfect one, the one you bit into whose flesh was sweet, full of juice, not too soft, not too tough, full of harvest fragrance and you’ll search for another one, but the perfect pear will be hard to find again.
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