The First Pears of September
The first pears of the year came in the second week of September, in a bag, from a tree two gardens along that nobody has any claim to and nobody has any intention of claiming. The tree is old and leans out over the fence, and the pears are small and green and hard as stones when they fall, and there is a short window each year when they are good and nobody is watching.
That window is about a week, and it is the reason my grandmother kept a paper bag on the kitchen windowsill from the middle of August. A pear picked too early goes soft and mealy and goes straight past the good stage, so you bring it home and put it in the bag with the fruit already ripe, usually an apple or a few apricots, and the bag holds the warmth and the ripe fruit gives off what the pear needs. My grandmother learned this from her mother and wrote it in the notebook without explanation, just the word pears, a drawing of a bag, and three apples.
This year the pears came in the usual way, and we ate them sliced with cheese, and then with bread and butter, and then, on the last day, my mother poached the soft ones in a pan with a little sugar and a stick of cinnamon, which is the only place in this family where cinnamon is allowed.
September is when the year stops rushing. The fruit comes slower, the days are cooler, the ice cream is made less and the pears are eaten more. We wrote the first line of the notebook for the autumn this week, in the same blue book, in her handwriting, because that is how she would have wanted it.