A good neighbor dropped by Sunday afternoon for a short visit and a wonderful surprise. Before leaving, he went to his truck and retrieved a paper sack. “You’ll like these,” he promised. He sat the sack down on the front porch and drove away.
Even before opening the package, a familiar aroma permeated the air and revived deep-seated memories from a half-century ago. Opening the crumpled, brown paper bag revealed what I anticipated. There, before me, was about two-dozen pawpaws and my mind started racing backwards in time.
As a child, I would take a walk with my father most every Sunday afternoon. He would go to the barn and put a 50-pound sack of stock salt on his shoulder and together, we would head to the pasture at the upper end of our creek-bottom farm where he would deposit the salt in the covered feeder. We would watch the cows and calves gather around the feeder while he would count cattle, observe how they were progressing and comment on the general health and quality of the herd. Those Sunday afternoon walks were the only times I can ever remember when dad wasn’t in a hurry. Eventually, we would head back to the house, taking a different route that always meandered by a small grove of pawpaw trees.
Knowing how I loved to eat pawpaws, he most likely took that route to either aggravate me or to teach me how to delay gratification because, regardless of the time of year, I would always ask, “Do you think the pawpaws will be ready to pick, today?” He’d laugh and point out that it was only May.
But, come the last week of September or the first week of October, we’d stop by the pawpaw grove on the banks of Lick Creek and they would be ripe. Dad would eat a few while I would consume enough to eventually make myself sick. As we would sit there and eat pawpaws, my father would talk about cattle, and crops, and his plans for the farm while I would nod in agreement while stuffing my mouth with the rare and delicious fruit. He would gather a few more to take to mom and my sister before heading home. The evening would usually conclude with a bout of nausea, stomach cramps or worse. Dad would just laugh.
With the neighbor’s gift, my wife got to sample the fruit for the first time in her life and she thought they were very tasty. My daughter-in-law, who is from Eastern Europe, had never even heard of the fruit and wanted to know the real name of the plant since a word like ‘pawpaw’ had to be made up. Once she tasted it, however, she declared it to be, “the most delicious taste she had ever experienced.”
I had a few, myself, and they were indeed good. Somehow, though, they just didn’t taste quite as delicious as I had remembered them, when sitting lazily on the creek bank with my dad. I suppose it could be argued that the habitat for the Lawrence County pawpaw is just different enough from the Ozarks County habitat to create a contrast between the two fruits. Or maybe, as noted by Stephen Wright, “Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I may have forgotten this before.”
