Heirlooms
The first Friday in September, I harvested pomegranates from my backyard tree, and on Labor Day weekend, I made pomegranate syrup and pomegranate jelly with my own recipes.
When I bought this house in 2020, the fruit seemed to come in with decay built in. Upon examination of the fruits I pulled down with hopeful wonder, I discovered blackened rot under the skin. Disappointed, I tossed away these inedible orbs, consigning the tree and its mysteries to the category of unknowable and inaccessible possibility. I figured that I needed some expert knowledge to care for the tree before it would produce anything of value. Who knows how long it had been without water. The house had been vacant when I purchased it, possibly for close to a year, after the old woman who inhabited it had passed away and her adult daughter had taken over the responsibility of selling it.
Buying during a pandemic felt risky. I was a first-time home-buyer. My four year-old relationship with a man I thought loved me had come apart at the seams, and my teen daughter and I needed an affordable living situation that I could manage on a teacher’s salary. Luckily, I had good credit and help from my family, so miraculously, I was able to find this place. A strange property to be sure – nearly a half acre of land including a huge empty lot on the parcel closest to the street and two tiny houses on the second parcel, one house less than 700 square feet and the other a mere 100 square feet, really just a free-standing room.
At first, I almost rejected it for its strangeness. My realtor Rita had humored me in checking it out since it was so affordable – she was gracious and kind, trying hard to find me the best possible place for the limited mortgage I could afford. Something about the windchimes drew me in. There were several smaller ones hanging from the eaves of the main house and one large one off the portico of the little house as well, all left behind for the new owner, it seemed, as the place stood vacant. I sat on the concrete ledge abutting the side of the main house, taking in the energy of the place. The temperamental Tucson May breeze blew the chimes, and a calm settled over me.
That Spring, I had newly taken up ancestral lineage healing work on my Mothers’ Mothers’ lineage while still living with my ex in a big, well-to-do central Tucson neighborhood, and one of the forms of ancestral contact that had emerged was the sound of my mother’s large wind chime that I had moved from the corner of the chicken yard to just outside my bathroom window. Every time I heard the chime in the wind that spring, I felt bathed with reassurance from Mama Babage, my ancestral guide on my mother’s side. Her name had come to me in one of my meditations, and I had even painted a watercolor image of her face that I put up in one of my altar cabinets. Among other things, I felt supported by my ancient mothers in purchasing a home at long last, so to hear all those chimes sounding that day with Rita pacing the property and checking out the usual things realtors look for, I began to sense that perhaps the Mothers’ Mothers were, in fact, pointing me here.
“Well, this place is the definition of potential,” Rita pronounced, rounding the corner of the house after checking out the large, mouldering, garage-like structure to the west of the house, a building that was described on the realty listing as “the cantina.” As it turns out, the neighbors used to fill up the large empty lot to the north of the main house with their parked cars to come drink and dance on weekend evenings. A couple months after buying, a middle-aged pair of siblings showed up at my front door, introducing themselves as the niece and nephew of the former inhabitants, providing me with all kinds of intel about the people who had built the place and lived there for the better part of four decades. By now, it had become a somewhat run-down neighborhood, despite having a resilient, long-standing, working-class contingent of Mexican heritage families; unhoused individuals gathered near the parking lot of the Arco Gas station on the corner just down the block from the house, and often meandered towards the bus station a few blocks to the east, a major city hub on the Southside at Irvington and 6th, just adjacent from the historic Rodeo grounds.
The chimes called me in, even if little else did. I felt out of place in the new environs, suspiciously gazing at tree roots and weeds tangled by trash up and down the block, noting the empty chip bags, soda cans, and dirty napkins that blew in piles along the old chain link fence bordering the front of the property I would eventually call home.
One of my first purchases for the house was a used washing machine (and a dryer that I could never actually plug in, since I had the wrong kind of electrical outlet) which I installed in the cramped laundry nook in the back of the main house under a flimsy roof. Luckily, there was a large clothesline strung on metal poles behind the house, so my daughter and I could hang up our washed clothes in the hot, dry, desert air. I asked my plumber to install a greywater pipe to send the washing machine water into a pit that I dug in the yard in hopes of using the diverted water for landscaping rather than just flushing it down a trap to the sewage pipes. Although for a while it seemed all the excess water was just nurturing a massive wall of bermuda grass that took over the back alley behind my house, it also inevitably sent water to the roots of the pomegranate that in the first fall had produced only rotten fruit.
My mother came to visit me at the house in the late fall of 2021. She pruned the pomegranate, pulling off big dead branches and trimming down the unruly growth and raking up all the dead pomegranate rinds that had gathered under the tree. I had expressed frustration that a second year in a row I had gotten a bunch of rotten fruit and a massive influx of these strange, flying beetle things that to my untrained eye looked a lot like assassin bugs but which Google Lens searches informed me were Leaf-footed bugs. Still, they had an erratic, buzzing flight path that when disturbed, flew straight into my face, and they seemed to cling grotesquely in mating clusters on every single pomegranate fruit on the tree, so if I reached for any, my fingers inevitably brushed a tete-a-tete of creepy creatures with long, spindly legs and boxy bodies that seemed ready to climb on me or, worse, fly at me.
Last fall was another year with no sweet fruits to harvest, despite a very deep soak of extraordinary rains last summer after the previous summer being as dry as a bone.
This summer 2022, we had another round of decent rains, and the greywater supply had been ample all year for the tree and the bermuda grass. A couple weeks ago, I fully registered the fact that my pomegranate tree, so gorgeous in the spring with tons of orangey-red flowers that slowly morphed into crimson globes with once fire-bright petals faded to dry lipstick-red twists poking from the triangular points of the top of each globe, swollen with the water the tree roots pumped from the ground and turned into the many-faceted, glistening seeds that would finally fill with pink juice until every green-leafed branch was heavily weighted, brushing the ground throughout late July and August. Most of the fruit was increasingly bathed in a soft pinky-red blush. The branches nearly groaned with a tantalizing crop, but to my surprise, I saw very few of the bugs from previous years crawling around. My enthusiasm spiked, and I wondered if maybe the tree was doing better now that it had had a pruning and a lot more water.
I went away for a week, marveling that perhaps my mom’s work-up with pruning shears had been even more important for the health of the tree than predicted, but when I returned from my hiatus, I saw several more of those loathsome bugs gathering on the fruit, and all my old fears about the crop of fruit going bad fired up. I had found that spraying the bugs with hose water when they gathered on the mesquite beans on another tree earlier in the spring seemed to scare them away at least temporarily, so I resolved to spray down the pomegranate and then go in with gloves and harvest every fruit off the tree before the bugs ruined them. I hauled empty boxes out of stacks in the laundry room that hadn’t made it to the recycling bin and started filling them with pomegranates. Although the morning was partly cloudy, the muggy early September heat pressed harder as the sun rose higher and hotter through the spotty cloud cover, and my face pinked and my shirt soaked with sweat. I pressed on, twisting each fruit off and dropping them in a cascade of thunks into the boxes. I filled two large boxes to the brim and overflowed a few smaller boxes. I finished the job in the alley to get the last of the fruits from the branches hanging over the fence. On the way into a sub job that afternoon, I carried two large cloth grocery sacks with fruit to share with coworkers, but I still had a massive quantity of fruit to contend with waiting for me at home.
I began researching pomegranates. What kind of pomegranates did I have? I learned that the Sonoran desert region had something called an Heirloom White Pomegranate that the priests brought to the desert from Europe when they started the missions hundreds of years ago. The tree is fully desert adapted and a fine source of food for animals, bugs, and humans in this region. Although many of my fruit’s innards were bordering on a light red, several of them were closer to pink or white, and it struck me that in previous years when I’d opened the rotten fruits and seen amidst the bloom of black mold and rot the nearly white seed fruits, I assumed that the whiteness of the insides meant that the plant was truly doomed, since I’d never heard of pomegranates that were anything but a deep blood-red. Now, I had more perspective, and the fruits seemed even more strange and miraculous to me. Even when they had been rotten, they hadn’t been far from their potential.
The pomegranate tree has yielded its treasure. I now recognize that I have a truly fine crop of fruit on my hands. The few that I had pulled off the tree the week before I left town, were, upon opening, a juicy and sweet red. After opening some of the new fruits I had picked that Friday, I discovered that nearly everything I took off the tree this year was in perfect condition, bursting with brightly colored juices on a spectrum of pale pinks to dark reds. Replete with sweetness.
