I failed the Lidl employee aptitude test.
My job application was rejected. My mum thinks this is because I don’t like to hurry, and all who frequent Lidl know that the checkout panic is a fundamental part of the experience. I like to dwell. Sometimes dwelling is futile – I recall when I thought I’d made the wrong decision to ride the toy train at the seaside:
‘Don’t dwell!’ my best friend shouted.
I stopped dwelling.
My degree, English, requires a lot of dwelling on things that might be better skimmed over. Recently my brain has been dwelling on topics that make me feel anxious, however I shall now channel this musing into the beautiful and poetic: fruit.
I consider myself a rather fruit-oriented individual. I have a fruit poster in my room and I eat fruit for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Such is my enjoyment that my beloved friend bought me a Jellycat raspberry. Moreover, I am emotionally invested in strawberries. My fruit love was recently highlighted when I found out that we’re moving house.
‘But the fruit!’ I said. ‘We’ll miss the strawberry harvest!’.
Our house has a 9m square strawberry patch, yielding about 40kg of strawberries a year. I deeply feel that these strawberries are a gift. Not only do they save us money, and allow us to eat strawberries all year round, but they also signal our middle-class-ness by filling the second freezer. Frozen strawberries become ice cubes in summer, jam in winter. The plants fruit for just over two months, most inconveniently over exam season, but their harvest still remains my favourite part of the summer. Oh to go down the garden and taste their sweet goodness! We are lucky to have such fruit in our garden: not just strawberries, but raspberries, plums, blackberries, pears, blueberries and PEACHES. Peaches I tell you! I am most enchanted with the peach tree. It is a source of wonder to me. One year, we had 150 peaches. 150 peaches! From a Yorkshire garden!
I can conclude nothing other than this fruit is magic. It is a gift to my family because we are guardians of the plants – we don’t own the house. I worry that its next inhabitants will not care for the strawberries as well as I; they will not value the generosity of the gifts the earth gives to them.
‘But Chloe!’ I hear you cry. ‘Fruit cannot be magic!’. Ah yes. Let us revisit my bold, vaguely obtuse, claim. I used the word ‘magic’ dramatically. I mean that fruit is more than a consumable capsule of yumption; it has a function beyond its immediate use to humans. Fruit is not merely to be eaten but is an activity to be taken part in. The poem ‘The Orange’ by Wendy Cope lives above my bed, describing the narrator who, amongst other things, shares a “huge orange” with their friends Robert and Dave, who “got quarters and I had a half”. I often share fruit with my friends; it is an immersive act of love. Let me explain…
When you eat an orange you have your hands around it. You might squidge it. You hold it in both hands before breaking the skin, juice dripping, pith peeling. Your hands retain the oil’s scent in the peel’s absence, your thumb breaking the segments apart. You pass a segment, each of you consumed and consuming. We are sharing the fruits of our love. If you’re feeling investigative, each segment is broken, bitten in half, peeled, played with, deconstructed, sucked. Having conjured our orange, would you agree that it is an experience? They’re so indiscreet, the juice running down your hands. One can eat an orange silently, but its scent always betrays it.
If we’re going to dwell even further, fruit is a self-contained object of loveliness that is connected to where it came from, possibly by a little leaf. The fruit is a whole in itself. Eve aside, our fruit-thinking has seeped into our idioms. We talk of children as ‘fruits of the womb’, literal produce as ‘fruits of the earth’ and Jesus talks of virtues as ‘fruits of the spirit’ (Galatians). This all points to fruit as the end result, but for me, a woman who dwells against her will, fruit is an event to be shared in, even if it is just between you and a strawberry. It feels so secret and cheeky, picking them off the plant and tasting the warm sweetness of joy. Unless it’s sour, of course. A whole other matter.
Today we have dwelt, and it has borne us fruit.
For fruity poems in its most literal sense, see ‘The Orange’ by Wendy Cope, ‘Oranges’ by Roisin Kelly and ‘This Is Just To Say’ by William Carlos Williams. For fruity fruit poems, see ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti.