Figs From the Neighbour's Tree
The fig tree at number next door was planted by a man whose name we have never been told, because he died before we moved here, and every year in the last week of July it gives away more fruit than the two people who live there can eat. Mrs Aldini shakes the branches herself and puts the basket on the wall, and nobody has ever arranged that, it just happens.
We took a bowl on the Sunday. The figs were soft and brown and split at the shoulder, the way they should be, and the smell of them in the warm kitchen was so strong that Elena went to sleep in the same room as the bowl and we had to move it to the cold shelf in the morning.
My mother made a short thing with them. A pan, a splash of water, a spoonful of honey at the end, and the figs cut in half and cooked until the flesh gives up and the liquid thickens around it. It takes about fifteen minutes from the board to the plate, and it is the only recipe in our family that is measured in minutes rather than in quantities, because the figs decide it.
We ate it with cold cream and a little bread toasted hard, which is how my grandfather ate figs at the end of every summer of his life. Mrs Aldini was given a jar and told the truth, that the honey had been in it, and she said that the honey was her idea first, years ago, and that we had all learned it from each other, which is the sort of thing neighbours say.