Pomegranates

I don't know who planted the two old pomegranate trees that flourish in our garden. Perhaps the Arabs who lived in the house before 1948 planted it, along with the vine and the fig tree, or it could be that it was the Kurdish Jews who lived there from the late 1940s until we bought the house from them in 1983. The trees give very sour fruit of varying size. Very few of them ripen into bright red globes like the plump, uniform fruit you can buy in a store.

This year they produced a huge crop. I have picked about 100 kg., and that doesn't count the ones that rotted on the tree after insects beat me to them. In the past week I have spent hours and hours picking them, squeezing juice from them with an orange juice squeezer, straining the juice, and trying to figure out where to store it. I froze a gallon or more of it, and our refrigerator is loaded with it.
As I did this physical labor and food preparation, I kept thinking about a story by William Saroyan that I read years and years ago, about an uncle of his, who planted pomegranate trees in California and lost his shirt. I also thought about Asher, who spent hundred and hundreds of working hours preparing food. He loved the contact with the materials and tools, the processes, the smells and tastes, the attention you have to give to what you're doing.
Sometimes I try to get into his head when I do things that he did or might have done, especially when it's something a bit uncharacteristic of me, like messing with dozens and dozens of pomegranates.
I tried to appreciate it all: the stickiness of the juice, the scratches on my arms from reaching through the branches to get an elusive piece of fruit, the repetitive cutting and squeezing, and the trips to the garbage cans with heavy sacks full of rotten fruit and crushed halves of the fruit that had been intact. I especially relished the intense purplish red of the juice.
It doesn't make me sad when I do things that remind me of Asher. I'm sad anyway. Rather it makes the things I do more meaningful, a way of communing with him.